The Inlookers

The Inlookers are the result of a eugenic movement that has been forgotten by everyone except the Inlookers themselves. Mentally, they are almost as outstandingly eccentric in behaviour as they are intelligent and imaginative although whether their abnormalities are biological or cultural is a matter of considerable debate. Physically, many Inlookers have reflexes that are inevitably described as "cat-like." The rate of albinoism and other minor defects is especially high among Inlookers, due to inbreeding.

However, it is behaviour that defines Inlookers to most people. Although widely considered pathologically unstable and prone to grudges, they are also valued for their loyalty, scholarship, and artistic talent, making them the most ambivalent of all clans.

History

The Inlookers have so little in common with the rest of humanity that they are rumoured to be the descendants of a generation ship that was launched in the days of the Terran Sphere. Their long journey would explain the number of records that they preserve and jealously guard from those days, and might also explain their interest in eugenics. Historians generally do not credit this explanation much.

An alternate explanation is that they are the descendants of Incitantoled, a movement that arose during the Great War that advocated the improvement of human genetics as a necessary step towards victory over the Crucians. Although little is known about Incitantoled, the group is known to have accepted refugees and misfits of all sorts into its ranks, a habit that the Inlookers also share.

Scholars from other clans believe that the Inlookers know the truth of their origins, but, when asked, Inlookers say only that genetic history is more important than events and that the past is unimportant compared to the future. This last remark is usually interpreted as suggesting that the Inlooker's breeding program has some unspecified goal — presumably, the creation of what the Inlookers would regard as the epitome of all that they value.

Whatever the truth, the Inlookers are known to follow the teachings of Juvela Thompson. If this name is her real one, no records of her survive from any era. However, the name is probably an assumed one: her teachings included not only a radical eugenic program that rejects gene surgery on the grounds that breeding programs produce stabler, further-reaching effects, but also the use of an invented language said to pre-date the Terran Sphere.

What can be said more confidently is that, from the earliest days of the empire, the Inlookers have inhabited Libereco, a large, marginal world with more than its share of low lying banks of mud and reeds. They arrived there with their beliefs fully developed and in general practice among them, and with their dominant traits already in evidence. The succeeding millennia have only served to make those traits more prevalent.

Following the Inlooker's own comments about the importance of genetic history, several surgeons have managed to dissect the corpses of clan members who have died on other planets. Their findings are sometimes widely inconsistent, leading some to speculate that the Inlooker breeding program has several different strains. Some have reported that Inlooker brains are much less specialized than is standard in humans, which suggests that Inlookers would not only recover from brain damage unusually quickly but also make connections between ideas and information that would be impossible for other humans. Others have estimated that nerve impulses are transmitted as much as 50% faster in Inlookers, and that greater muscle density allows for disproportionate strength for their size.

However, the only indisputable result of these autopsies was the deaths of the surgeons involved in inventive and prolonged fashions, followed by the disappearance of both the corpses and most records of the autopsies. These consequences are widely taken as proof that the Inlookers are every bit as dangerous as legend makes them.

One of the many rumours that surround Inlookers is that a handful of them — possibly the inner circle of their government — were not only responsible for the Disappearance, but have returned from wherever those who vanished went. Certainly, the Inlookers survived the confusion with much less upset to their culture than any other clans. Some observers suggest sourly that they were in too much of a daze to notice any change.

The Inlookers Today

Enclaves of Inlookers exist throughout the empire, some of them quite large. However, the center of the clan remains Libereco. There, in the city of Novka Esperi, Kindred House is located, the great repository of genetic knowledge and research that is unparalleled throughout the galaxy. The Kindred House contains the genetic records of almost every Inlooker who ever lived, and contains representative samples of countless human, alien, and animal genetic material or at least their mapped genomes. Over the years, it has also become the repository of countless historical and sociological records as a byproduct of its main concerns.

All Inlookers store samples of their genetic material at the Kindred House. In the rare cases where they cannot (usually the death of children or infants), their survivors make every effort to do so for them. The Kindred House also has a steady stream of rich and desperate non-clan members seeking cures and gene surgery, or biological evidence for genealogy. In fact, a large part of Novka Esperi's economy is devoted to meeting their needs.

Novka Esperi is ruled by the Klerulo, the senior scientist at the Kindred House. Administrators and bureaucrats take care of everyday affairs, but since the Klerulo's office determines who may marry or reproduce, and which children survive, in practice it determines all policy on the planet. Branch offices are found on every planet with an enclave of Inlookers, and perform similar functions in consultation with the main Kindred House.

The Klerulo's office inspects every Inlooker born to the clan, and has the power to order them exposed at birth, or at any time subsequent to their twelfth birthday. Newborns are exposed at the Bucêjo, a lonely piece of river delta to the east of Novka Esper. After their twelfth birthday, Inlookers may still be expelled from the clan if they fail any of the rigorous mental and physical tests that last until they are eighteen, but are allowed to live. Some of these rejects form an underclass that provides various forms of labor for the clan, while others immigrate to other planets, where they frequently have brilliant careers as artists and scholars.

A widespread rumour holds that the Klerulo occasionally orders the slaughter of entire families, presumably in order to eliminate undesirable traits. The Inlookers themselves sometimes allude to dark periods in their history in which such genocides happened, but they do not seem a feature of recent centuries. What is true is that several times entire families have been expelled from the clan (perhaps as a shift in the goals of the breeding program), and that some families have tried to bribe members of Kindred House into falsifying the records of their rivals. These attempts at bribery are extremely unlikely to succeed, given the morale and loyalty of those who work at Kindred House, and the habit of crosschecks on everything they do.

The Klerulo's office does arrange marriages, breeding liasions, and artificial insemination for clan members. These customs are reinforced by a sub-strain in Inlooker art that talks about the horror of romantic love and the unsupervised mating of unsuitable pairs.

At other times, the Klerulo will accept new members into the clan in order to develop new bloodlines. These new members are surprisingly common in some periods, and their initiations include adoption or marriage into a sponsoring family. To be a sponsor of a new member is considered a great honour by Inlookers, since it often indicates that the bloodline has traits that Kindred House wishes to preserve or reinforce. However, outsiders who would fit into the Inlookers tend to be rare, so perhaps the Klerulo's office sometimes arranges for use of non-clan genetic material without telling anyone at the time it is used. More commonly, Inlookers may offer support to refugees persecuted for genetic or psychological differences without welcoming them into permanently into their families.

Status among Inlookers is not due to wealth, but to bloodline and to how closely an individual meets the declared Inlooker norms. However, in practice, wealth and bloodline come to the same thing since the more status that a bloodline has, the easier time its members have in becoming successful and accumulating wealth.

At least one group of Inlookers have rebelled against this tight control. Defiantly calling themselves the Malfidelulo (The Renegades), they have colonized their own planet of the same name. Although their intention is to breed back into the general galactic population, ironically, the isolation of their new home makes the Malfidelulo as isolated genetically as orthodox Inlookers. Individual Inlookers have also been known to withdraw from the clan.

However, such rebellions against Kindred House are the exception, not the norm. Inlookers are used to consulting their leaders in eugenic matters, and contributing to their bloodline is the major ambition of almost all Inlookers. They tend to have large families and plural marriages, which evolved as an effort to give some stability and morality to the breeding programs. These marriages mean that the average Inlooker lives in a house many times larger than the citizen of other governments. In fact, some visitors to Inlooker enclaves have described these houses as "palaces."

Outside their reproductive history, Inlookers are believed to be governed by the fact that they lack the usual divisions between the conscious and unconscious parts of their minds — a trait that gives them their collective name. They place great store in dreams, which they consider as real as their waking lives, and dream interpreters are almost as honoured as the employees of Kindred House in Inlooker society.

More than one non-clan member has been mystified when an Inlooker has approached them and tried to continue a conversation or transaction from a dream. In theory, Inlookers know that others do not remember their dreams as well as they do, but in practice they forget. They also have a hard time understanding that others do not share their dream, which lead some to suggest that Inlookers share a common dreamscape with each other. However, others suggest that the Inlooker habit of sitting down to talk dreams is a means of reaching consensus about what happened in dreams that some participants in the conversation have no recollection of.

When troubled, Inlookers are prone to take drugs to induce dreams in the hopes of finding a solution. At times, they leave everything they are doing to embark on vision quests to the wilderness of a planet or into deep space, or to undertake fasts and self-torture or mutilation to reach other forms of consciousness.

Such peculiarities often makes Inlookers artists, thinkers, and tacticians of unsurpassed brilliance. However, they also make them unreliable and sometimes dangerously unstable. At the best of times, Inlookers are highly emotional, and their frequent outbursts of rage often lead to duels, grudges, and century-long feuds. This instability is thought to greatly slow the progress of the Inlooker breeding program. Possibly, it is also a consequence of inbreeding.

Relations to Other Clans and Intelligent Species

Whether Inlookers are more feared for their instabilities or valued for their talents is often difficult to say. At some points in imperial history, members of the Founders and Aristocracy kept Inlookers in their entourages as advisors. However, this practice ended rather abruptly when Akruetes III, one of the last emperors, was killed by an Inlooker for blocking the sun while she flagellated herself. However, some Spartans tend to consult them as oracles, a practice that also becomes a fashion among business executives every few decades somewhere in the empire. Some scholars believe that Inlookers deliberately exaggerate their instabilities, both for personal amusement and to command higher prices for their services.

Since The Disappearance made the line of succession to many imperial titles obscure, the Aristocracy has turned to Inlookers for a new reason: as a source of proof of their claims to positions and estates left vacant by the loss of so many citizens.

Inlookers tend to view Spacers with their cyborg attachments with horror, and Clones as a perversion of solid genetic principles. They hold the same view, to a lesser extent, of Drylanders, Aquans, and Taurans. However, Inlookers are always willing to put aside these views for any clans who suffer persecution for genetic differences, or for a chance to study new genetic material.

Many Inlookers are fascinated by the Walkers, and Inlooker sociologists are responsible for the classical sociological studies of that group. For Inlookers, the attraction seems to be the mental abnormalities of the Walkers and the effect that their pariah status has had on their culture.

Curiosity about other forms of sentience and genetic material has sometimes led members of the clan to search for Crucians and Demons. Since these searchers have not returned, their efforts are assumed to have been fatal. Ferrets have also been the subject of Inlooker curiosity, to the great benefit of human scholarship.

Names

The Inlookers have revived the ancient artificial language of Esperanto, and speak it by preference (Alechjo, Georgo, and Petro for men, Pipra, Tondra, and Aminda for men).