A/N: Enjoy.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Charming Jack, exasperated Richard, and curious Rachel,

I sometimes think the best part of writing these reports for you is the spluttering, rage-filled responses of Richard to what is unveiled. Certainly the idea that salarians can see the future was not conducive to his level of calm. . . I suppose I should have foreseen that?

Ah, poor choice of words.

I do hope the following observations regarding the rest of salarian culture are not so .. upsetting. Humans are not meant to be that color, I fear.

All jokes aside, much of the polymorphic nature of salarian culture is in the smaller aspects of how it is expressed, which I hope I can make clear and easy to comprehend. This report is somewhat slapdash – I fear that Agent Lawson is attracting a touch too much attention from the STG, despite keeping an outstandingly low cover. Once I transmit, we'll depart for the outer-rim Black Reach colonies, to pursue a few old contacts of mine in preparation for a report on the military and governmental functions of the Salarian Union. Carrying such out here would be suicidal, and I for one have no wish to fight through a pack of STG forces, or worse.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Hate is never enough for the alien – love is never enough for mankind.

Language and cant

Salarians speak one main language, Sur'kai, which is a totally spoken language – it has no written form at all. Sur'kai is a verb-linking verb-noun-modifier language, which results in many salarians speaking in what other intelligent beings would consider incomplete sentences. As an example, a human would say "John got in his aircar and drove to the store". The salarian would only say "Aircar at store, John arrives".

Salarians who spend long amounts of time among aliens, particularly salespeople and political figures, often take up a form of speaking more identifiable to aliens, but when stressed or alarmed will slip back into the staccato rhythms of Sur'kai.

The written form of language is not unified in the slightest. Historically, the various clans and then nations were always seeking to steal from one another, and thus the language cants were born. Although they have dwindled in number over the years, at least thirty are still in wide usage. Cants are encrypted written codes that link up with a central repository of Sur'kai words, linked by pictorial graphs or phonetic sounds.

The fact that there is no unified written language means that almost all salarian computer systems are heavily graphical and audio driven. This makes information gathering a hassle, and the most commonly used cant, that of the scientists, is widely translated into other languages for easier understanding. There are cants that are offshoots of these, used by individual clans, and the STG has both an intel-cant and a battle-cant.

Salarians also communicate through a code of subdermal vibrations known as 'quivertalk'. Quivertalk is taught in childhood and used when speech is risky, or (amusingly) during sexual heats when it is hard for salarians to think clearly. STG units have their own version of quivertalk, but how they utilize it is still a mystery to me.

After all, one cannot simply ask them.

Clan Customs

I have spoken of the larger families and guilds, but the regular salarian clan is also important. The average clan has anywhere from fifty to three hundred members, organized around a single dalatrass and her council of daughters. The dalatrass and the daughter's council make all the financial, breeding, and economic decisions for the entire clan.

Most clans are broken into three rough striations. The top of the structure is the female members, who are subdivided themselves. The Dalatrass does not breed, her daughters do, and thus dalatrasses are the only female figure most salarians (much less outland aliens) ever see. The rest of the females are cloistered away, at the very least until they are too old to breed or go into heats, and most stay with the younger females after that, passing on knowledge.

Below the females are the 'elderboys', the older salarians who are in the favor of the dalatrass and inline for breeding rights. One must prove their worth to the clan to enter their ranks, and many of them are successful at whatever they've applied themselves to, and are now more focused on ensuring their legacy of success is passed on to their clan members.

At the bottom are the 'children', young salarians and those not favored for breeding. The bulk of the clan falls into this category.

It's worth noting that clan structure sounds immutable, but is not. While setting the females away from males is de rigor due to the effects of the heats, the methods clans use to determine breeding worthiness vary wildly, and some clans graduate their members more finely – breeder males good enough for trading but not for breeding inside the clan, members to trade to other clans, etc. Even females are often divided into 'worthy to breed' and unworthy status.

Most clans have small holidays, hatch-day ceremonies, and a very large number of parties – for such a serious people, salarians will celebrate at the fall of a drop of rain if allowed. Clans usually follow the dictates and customs of their parent clans, in terms of colors adopted in dress, or even styles, but are more individualistic when it comes to musical tastes or cooking.

Breeding, Bidding, and Contracting

Understanding salarian breeding and bidding contracts is key to grasping exactly how strange these people are.

Salarian dalatrasses work hard at identifying valuable traits in their own breeding lines, and trying to marry those traits up with other useful traits in other breeding lines. The more highly placed a clan is, the more time it has to breed changes, developing a stable of desirable mates both male and female. Some breeding is done within the clan, if the genetics are right and there is no chance of inbreeding. But most breeding ends up being done between clans.

Salarians attach financial values to the right to breed for a certain number of eggs, or to fertilize a certain amount of eggs from specific males. The exchanges can be in data, in cash, lands, companies, stock, clan members, starships or even allegiance and nationality changes.

Some breeding clans are so successful they are traded on the salarian stock markets. Generally speaking, however, there are broad categories of breeding contracts. The thim-than are professionals who do nothing but breed salarians. They have dozens of females and hundreds of males with wide ranges of intellects, physical traits, and mental abilities, and they make offers to salarians of other clans to join them and be on offer. Calling them prostitutes would be very wrong, as they don't sell the breeding act so much as the outcome of such. They post 'contracts', which are in essence a mix of breeding advertisement and insurance policy. For example, if a contract is taken by a lesser clan to breed four females with certain skin tones and vocal ranges, with intelligence in a certain range, the thim-than would deliver that.

The other big section of breeding clans are the thal-skithar, the Craft Guilds answer to being locked out of the breeding contracts from above. The thal-skithar are almost certainly very close to prostitutes, as they are not even really clans so much as groups of breeders left to breed. Males and females in thal-skithar compounds are freely mixed, turning into very little more than ongoing orgies and massive amounts of egg-laying. These eggs are harvested and sold in batches with genetic and informational tags on the input breeders to smaller clans to act as booster stock.

If this all seems rather cold and impersonal, well, it is. To me, it is somewhat appalling, that the futures of young salarian children are so many chips in a bidding contract. To salarians, it is natural – the family is the totality of everyone in the clan. Parents are not important, at least biologically speaking. Raising children seems to be a communal affair.

Cultural Shifts and Allegiance Changes

With the ruthlessness of their breeding programs, it should be no surprise that the very loyalty and allegiance of clans is also for sale. Most clans are tied to their parent clan, and from their to the district clan, and the national 'overclan' – be that a colony world or a nation on the homeworld.

However, these links are not permanent, and salarian society has entire newspapers and magazines devoted to nothing else but the shift of one clan to another as they jockey for access and position. Clan loyalty is determined solely by the dalatrasses, and staying in a given clan structure requires certain levels of compensation and mutual interest. When these fade, the clan moves on to some other clan structure.

There are 'clan swaps' where two clans merge into each others larger clan family, and 'shifts' where a large and fundamental clan moves to a different nation or colony allegiance and their daughter colonies must decide whether to stay or follow.

All of this is tracked by computers, by news services, and by gossip. Corporations attached to certain clans make new business agreements or cancel fixed rate services based on the ever-shifting patterns of clan alliances and breeding contracts. The sheer amount of data involved is measured in exabytes and is only manageable by custom-written, focused VI's.

If you pay enough attention to the larger outlines of these flows, however, you can sense patterns and movements of the salarian race as a whole. For example, in the past four years, most allegiances have been broken up with the Offworld Clans from the Service Guilds, and in their place have been offers from both the Free Clans and the Craft Guilds, indicating a furtherance of interests in offworlder salarians from the homeworld families.

Access and Intelligence

Aside from religion and family relationships, access and intelligence are the other two factors of salarian culture. By 'access', I mean clan access to breeding females, and within clan structures, a clan's ability to trade for other breeding rights.

A male is measured, as I stated in the psychology section, by their ability to be useful for the clan, to prove they are worthy of being included in the breeding calculations that the dalatrasses perform. As such, there are wide arrays of services, planning, even training programs designed to develop salarians, as well as books, music, and art relating to the search for such closure. At the same time, salarian males who have bred often emit a certain level of smug achievement and begin to turn their minds to something that will aid the clan in the long term, since their personal immortality is assured, and many of the most staggering achievements in salarian history come from such males.

Intelligence is the other factor, and by that I do mean spying and gathering information. It is embedded in every level of salarian culture, from the games their children play to ordering a meal at a restaurant. Salarians see information that comes without cost or effort as somehow of less value, and the government is riddled with interlocking loops that require one department to spy on another. Astonishingly, this crazed-sounding ideal has produced a government with almost no waste, zero graft, and very little corruption at any level.

Guilds and Culture

Aside from the rigidly defined ranks of the Craft Guilds, there are thousands of guilds in salarian culture. Most are assembled from three to eight closely related clans, and they tend to operate in broad bands of work. Most salarian corporations are in-fact the public face of a guild (or in some cases, several guilds, each of which hold seats on the board of directors).

Most guilds pick a particular aspect of a particular field of study, and judge their members quality and worthiness to breed on that. For example, there is a guild that does decrypting translations of video games for conversion to salarian markets, a guild that works with nothing but chilled fish products from offworld sources, a guild that focuses on producing surgeons with specializations in muscle repair and muscle grafts, and so on and so forth.

A guild must register with the planetary authority – the Reach Guildhall on Sur'kesh itself, otherwise the offices of the planet's Senior Dalatrass. A guild must define its specialty very finely, because once registered and accredited, it is illegal for anyone – alien or salarian – to practice that work form without explicit permission from the guild.

The Craft Guilds, of course, often overlap these specialists, but they are exempt from such (which is why there is such friction between the Craft and Service Guild segments of the population). However, in general, if you want a service, you go to the service guilds – if you want to hire workers in large numbers, you go to the Craft Guilds.

Each guild popularizes certain dress styles, colors, foods, music, and even building styles. Most guilds are loosely extended families, since the clans comprising them are related, and in some cases inter-guild breeding contracts are conducted in loose, laid back manners.

The oldest of the guilds is the Honored Scrivener Guilds of Translation of the Asari Language, which dates back to the meeting between my people and the Salarians, and is the only group of people who can translate the asari language into written cant or spoken Sur'kai. They have revenues of thirty or so million credits a year, and are often called 'h-pens' in salarian cant slang. This is just an example of the sort of variety of guilds that exist.

Arts and Music

Salarian art is a taste, a mindset, and a method of perhaps reinterpreting the word 'art'. Human art is designed to evoke an emotional response based on visual appreciation, while asari art relies on overtones and relationships to other works to produce a mental reaction. The hard lines of turian art create physical reactions and responses based on turian hunting reflexes triggered by following said lines, and what little sense can be made of batarian art seems to exemplify that, to borrow a crude parlance from Ms. Lawson, that their dicks are bigger than everyone else.

Salarian art is designed to deceive the eye and fool the emotions. It evokes conflicting emotional responses in salarians, often faster than they can themselves process, producing a sort of gestalt of blended reactions. It is a mix of visual and sensory queues – often painting, sculpture and performance art lose their boundaries.

Salarian art is never static, it is produced and performed. A salarian painter will master every brushstroke of his work, and paint it again and again before audiences. The very act of creation, of the art being made, it itself a key piece of the art.

To watch such artists at work is humbling, their movements passionate and yet perfect, so fast the eye becomes dizzy trying to follow. Music is a big part of these presentations as well, crafted to not only the aural ranges but certain levels of vibration that only salarians can hear. There are arts of scent and smell, arrangements of haptic images in chaotic bands that frame and highlight the center art, and a sense of watching something evolve. It is majestic and fascinating...and, of course, deceptive.

In every such artwork, another is hidden. It becomes a game (or part of the piece, I find myself uncertain) to find the hidden work within the greater whole. The greatest masters of salarian art have never had their hidden works found in their art, even hundreds of years later. Entire generations of salarian students master the works of Eyia Thursus, a painter who died seven hundred years ago, trying to find the hidden meaning and message in his work 'Place of Two Lines'.

Such devotion to the arts is humbling. Their appreciation of alien works is more … intriguing. Salarians have a school of thought that suggests alien art and music is a key to understanding cultural and even intellectual values of the species. Salarian economic specialists will study human movie releases and shifts in popular culture – not to advertise, or even gain a feel for market stability or customer satisfaction, but to decide if the human gestalt is ready for new concepts or if they wish older trends and familiar patterns. Military forces also study alien art.

The apparent silliness of this analysis becomes less amusing when one recalls that salarians pride themselves on understanding every facet of an enemy before the first strike, even that which the enemy does not himself know. I once spoke with a salarian general who told me what he took from asari art is that unity in our species is our true weakness, that an attack that worked against our natural desire to follow our matriarchs and rely on one another would be devastating.

I cannot disagree with his analysis, and I worry that even if I could not see how such a strategy would work, he had already come up with one.

Within the Clan

Day to day salarian life is hectic and fast paced, as can be expected from a short lived and frenetic race. They spend the majority of their time in work, study or other productive arts, and they tend to play as hard as they work.

Your average salarian citizen works twelve to fourteen hours every day. He rarely takes time off, only for major medical or family emergencies, and will often work longer hours if needed. Salarians do not have nuclear families or dedicated mates in most cases, so such long hours are not an imbalance for him.

The males will often spend their time after work in competitive, intellectual contests or in celebratory events. Games and tests of reflex, wit, and quick thinking are the most popular, while more physical contests (with the exception of a few high-speed, high reactions sports) are not common.

Video games and other electronic entertainment is a very common form of enjoyment, but salarians are surprisingly down to earth and enjoy nature as well. They are still powerful swimmers and love to engage in water sports almost as much as asari do.

Salarians discovering the human affection for high-speed racing, especially ground vehicle racing, became instant addicts, and the GASCAR circuit is nearly as popular on Sur'kesh as it is on Earth. The sheer reflexes, nerve, and speed of thought required to handle mass accelerated vehicles going six hundred kilometers an hour draws huge crowds.

Salarian daily life for the more successful members of a clan, or the females, is more sedate. They rarely leave their compounds, and are given more to reading and intense examination of the extranet. They partake in a great deal of haptic programming, from lurid turian soap operas to intellectual philosophy from hanar priests.

Philosophy

Deriving a coherent set of philosophical viewpoints from the morass of salarian culture is akin to finding muons by flailing about with a cup. There are so many wildly disparate views and nuanced schools of thought that investigating such would take more time that is available.

However, two basic schools of what might pass as salarian legalistic philosophy are very widespread and relevant to this work. The first is the Rule of Insight, a legendary view supposedly originating with Shego herself. Shorn of the fancy language and Wheel mysticism involved, it states that success or failure in any task is decided by if the end results reveals your true intentions, not by the final outcome. A salarian operation to steal valuable research data that succeeds but can be traced back to the perpetrators is an obvious failure...unless the perpetrators make it look as if they were frame and had no need of the data in the first place. They prize not only obtaining secrets, but either ensuring that they are never found out – or that if they are found out, the why is never truly known.

The larger ramifications of this way of thinking troubles me to no end. It makes me question exactly how much of what we know of salarians is merely yet another smokescreen, another onion layer between us and the core of the truth. I dislike evoking my voice in a way to make me sound like Dr. Minsta, but his revulsion at deception mirrors my feelings toward the salarian mindset. Something very dark and twisted has shifted this entire culture to a place where even the understanding of why an action was taken is more important than the action itself.

No sane being embraces that sort of thinking willingly.

The other school of thought is, on the surface, more benign. Often dubbed the Salarian Paradox, it goes as follows:

Knowledge gained is now a target for others, knowledge not gained a missed opportunity. Gaining advantage over others makes you a threat, but lacking advantage over others makes you vulnerable. Seek thus to turn your targets into opportunities and your vulnerabilities into threats, and you become unknowable.

The skewed logic of the above statement is perhaps the strongest message of the salarian mindset I can give you without a link to let you see the mazes of their minds for yourself. Human philosophy questions the nature of truth and reality. Turians seek an understanding of what honor and survival require. Asari ask how things interact with one another. Even the krogan have a certain symmetry and beauty in their harsh desert poetry and talk of a struggle against existence itself.

But the salarians reduce life to a cipher, a series of equations to be solved, of measures to be balanced. It is the soul of a watch, gears turning in the endless pursuit of empty exactitude. I often wonder if the wildness of their arts and music is a rebellion against such emptiness...or merely another smokescreen over it.

Entertainment and Tourism

Despite the natural beauty of Sur'kesh, the Salarian Union is not a promoter of tourism. Salarians are, however, often widely traveled themselves.

There are of course the usual amenities – salarians like hosting trade conferences, scientific gatherings, and the like. But trideo and haptic entertainment, while consumed in large amounts, is rarely sourced in salarian space, or even financed by them. The cities of Sur'kesh, for all their ancient beauty and majestic size, are too quiet at times. As if everyone watches, seeking, searching, or hiding.

Tourism in salarian space as a whole is a little better,but most of it remains confined to the more loosely regulated Black Rim colonies. Salarians touring other worlds are avid amateur photographers and vloggers, producing reams of memorable events from their stays in alien space. How much of this is real entertainment and how much is the subtle act of gathering information on alien worlds? I do not know.

Events and Holiday

Attempting to make any kind of sense of a salarian calendar is a waste of time, not because of it's complexity, but because it is often easier to find a day by looking for the holidays and celebrations associated with it.

A few important days do stand out, however. The most important of these is the Fall of Shego, the first week of the salarian new year, a time of the giving of small gifts laden with advice and when new contracts are negotiated. The Fall of Shego is a time when dancers fill the streets, haptic signs and masks of paper and thin wood decorate the face, and males compete in feats of reflexes and acrobatics as they did in ages past, hoping to impress a watching dalatrass enough to be brought into a clan.

Another holiday, Wheelflow, is mostly religious in origin. It is a day of meditation and reflection, to push harder at chosen goals and at the same time to look over one's shoulder and see how far they've come. Bereft of the wild dancing and other activities (drunkenness, aggressive male posturing, etc) that marks the Fall of Shego, Wheelflow is a more relaxed, laid back holiday.

Death Rites

The horror that is the Collapse Rot, and the fact that it might source from salarian corpses, explains why their funerary rites are so simple. Salarians that die are rapidly encased in omnigel, and after an extremely brief ceremony, incinerated. I'm afraid there isn't much more to it that that, and most salarians seem dismissive of the bodies of the dead, believing that in death they have already moved on beyond the interaction of our reality.