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The Ler are a fictional race from the science fiction novels of M. A. Foster. They appear in three of his books--The Gameplayers of Zan, The Warriors of Dawn, and The Day of The Klesh. The Warriors of Dawn mostly concerns the relationship between a human man and a ler woman, and The Day of The Klesh represents the ler as a mostly inscrutable humanoid race. The Gameplayers of Zan, on the other hand, discusses the origins of the ler as an engineered offshoot of humanity, and is as much about ler culture as their interactions with humanity. Ler reproduce infrequently, generally becoming fertile only every ten years. Most ler females have only two children, but occasionally they have a third, and twins are not unknown. Ler family structure is organized around a "braid". A braid starts with two "in-parents". They mate and produce the "elder outsibling". Then each of the in-parents goes forth and brings back another ler of the appropriate gender, the "out-parents". The in-parents each mate with an out-parent and produce the "insiblings", ten years younger than the elder outsibling. Then the out-parents mate and produce the "younger outsibling", ten years younger than the insiblings. The insiblings remain in the braid and become the in-parents to the next generation; the outsiblings will leave to join other braids as out-parents. The rare surplus children tend to be given the responsibility of beginning completely new braids together. Ler communicate mainly using a verbal language called Singlespeech. Each ler has a name consisting of three syllables, e.g. "Mallenkleth", though their intimates sometimes use shortened versions of the name. Various categories of objects always have names with the same numbers of syllables, e.g. stars have five-syllable names. There is also a less-frequently used mode of communication called Multispeech, which uses all the available communication channels, verbal and nonverbal, to convey information much more rapidly than Singlespeech ever could.
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