Omacran

Body

"A humanoid-squid-octopus form. Their head has webbed skin that falls like hair, arched at its center, with a translucent luminescent brain sack beneath. Their body is made up of intricate, naturally carved birth shells, protecting their luminescent bodies. White crystal eyes, a lifestone mind in the center of their stomach, beneath skin that varies in crushed purple pigmentations." Their tentacles end in "four soft waving fins, making up individual tri-fingered hands."

The brain sack is the finest sonar organ any Omari has, which is why they carry two hundred miles. It is also the caste's weak point in ordinary life: a torn sack is a common injury and a mild one, but it heals cloudy, and a speaker of the Weave who has served a long time can no longer see two hundred miles and must be led. Cutting the sack out blinds an Omacran without touching what it is, because the thought and the self and the whole chain of the dead sit in the stone in the gut.

The tri-fingered hands are the most delicate in the deep and the weakest, and an Omacran cannot hold a struggling thing. Under the shells lie the forty-one grown hoops of the ring frame, and inside them no gas at all: no lung, no bladder, no sinus. The white crystal eyes are the tide-glass of the harvest lists, the finest lens material on Nu, which no surface hand has ever held.

Society

They are the voice of their people to outsiders, and they do not lie well, because they can see through everyone else: they "are able to project the intentions of others to illuminate them to them." Among Omari nothing is hidden in any case, and a closed thought is an offence and never a right. The Omacran are the caste that cannot lie to another Omari and cannot be lied to, and the office of speaker belongs to them for that reason and no other.

A ruling of the Cradle is not debated on the Shelf. It is carried up by an Omacran speaker, and the Omasee execute it and the Omivar build it. The traffic runs the other way too. The garrisons, who lose people, want the elders to pass; the Omivar, who would have to raise the children, want them to wait; and both positions travel up and down the Weave in the mouths of a caste that physically cannot shade what it carries. That is why everyone trusts them, and it is the whole of their authority.

They witness oaths. An Omari oath is given in thought before an Omacran, who sees it settle in the swearer's mind and reports whether it took. The deep has no law of evidence and no law of perjury, because sonar shows the inside of a body and the pleated skin reads a heart. What the deep prosecutes is concealment, and the Omacran are the instrument by which concealment is found.

Almost every Omari the surface has ever met without being attacked was unwoven, born of a pair whose lifestones had greyed and carrying no chain at all, and it is the Cradle that sends them up and an Omacran who carries the order. They are also the only Omari who can be lied to successfully by another Omari, and the Weave has a small body of law about that which nobody enjoys citing.

Country

The Omacran hold the Weave, the middle city of Ien, a lattice of grown halls between the Shelf above and the sealed Cradle below, where the council of the species is held in thought. There are no streets in Ien and no facades, because nothing in the deep is seen from a distance and everything is heard from every distance. What the Omivar shape instead is return, so that a corridor answers a pulse with a chord and a ward tells you what ward it is before you have arrived.

Shed birth shells are gathered in the Weave and grown into the city, which means an Omacran hall is built partly out of the Omacran who have stood in it. They wear their birth shells and nothing else. Rank in the deep is shown by what has grown on the body and how long it has been growing.

Above the Weave is the surface, and the oath. Those who escaped the slaughter on land "swore to never return to land," and the oath still binds, so the caste whose whole office is speaking to outsiders does most of its speaking to nobody. A Do'urssan envoy who has been read by an Omacran does not go down again. Ohn'akwaa, the speaker of the Weave, is the only Omari known to have spoken in thought with such an envoy and let him go.