One way in which the Na’vi are entirely unlike us is in their queues.
A queue is a hair braid encasing a neural whip, an intricate mass of active neural tendrils. The Na’vi are able to join this organ to similar structures on other animals to make a neural bond, which the Omaticaya call the shahaylu. Onscreen we see this work with the direhorse, the banshee and the leonopteryx. Through his bond with his direhorse, avatar-Jake can sense the animal’s body, her heartbeat, her breath, the strength in her legs. And his will to some extent overpowers that of the linked animal. At first he commands her with words, but ultimately he is able to control the direhorse with inner “commands,” just as he controls his own body.
As well as a very visible demonstration of the Na’vi’s integration into their ecology, this is clearly a terrifically useful biological technology. It is like a natural version of the comprehensive neural interfaces that must be necessary to run Jake’s avatar body, as we’ll see in the next section. Perhaps avatar technology was in part inspired by the natural version on Pandora.
But we might speculate that in some ways the shahaylu has stifled Na’vi cultural evolution. If you can will a direhorse into submission you don’t need to break it. Perhaps the generations-long process of domestication with which humans have filled their world with more “useful” versions of animals like horses, sheep, cattle and dogs will never occur to the Na’vi.
What’s of more interest to us amateur xenobiologists, however, is how the neural link evolved.
The shahaylu is even more remarkable when you consider what diverse animals it links: Na’vi, direhorse, banshee. Humans are fairly remote relations to horses, and even more remote from birds and pterosaurs. As life on Earth evolved, the family of primates that would one day include humans split off from the “laurasiatheres,” the tremendous group that includes horses (along with camels, pigs, dogs, cats, bears…) as far back as eighty-five million years ago. This wasn’t even in the time of the mammals’ dominance; this was back in the Cretaceous age, the dinosaur summer before the big impact. And we split off from the group that includes leathery flying lizards such as the pterosaurs (and indeed the birds) even further back in time: an astounding three hundred million years ago, back in the Carboniferous age, halfway back to the time of the emergence of multicellular life in the first place. If similar evolutionary gulfs separate Na’vi from direhorse and banshee, how is it possible for them to develop such an intimate link as the shahaylu?
I can think of one terrestrial parallel: bees and flowers.
Like a bee pollinating a flowering plant on Earth, a Pandoran direhorse has a long snout it uses use to feed on sap drawn deep from plants like the direhorse pitcher. Both halves of the partnership benefit. The direhorse gets protein from insects trapped in the sap, and the pitcher plant gets pollinated. This behaviour is shared by some terrestrial animals, such as lemurs and possums. In some senses the link between bee and flower (and direhorse and pitcher plant) is a lot more fundamental even than the shahaylu. The bee has come to rely on the plant nectar for food, and the plant entirely relies on the bee for its means of fertilisation. This cooperation is not just a temporary alliance for horse-riding, but determines life and death for both partners.
But there had been insects around for three hundred million years before the flowering plants, the angiosperms, first appeared on the Earth back in the Cretaceous, the heyday of the dinosaurs. And the split between the plants and the vast family that includes all animals, insects and fungi was extraordinarily far back in time—billions of years ago. But once the flowering plants emerged, they co-evolved with the insects they cooperated with, establishing their extraordinarily intricate interdependence over millions of years.
So it is possible for astonishingly distantly related species to develop a remarkably close degree of cooperation, given enough time for natural selection to work. Perhaps something like this lies behind the shahaylu.
But for a Na’vi, whatever its origin, the neural queue is intimately linked to her experience of sex and death.
To quote the 2007 screenplay: “Neytiri takes the end of her queue and raises it. Jake does the same, with trembling anticipation. The tendrils at the ends move with a life of their own, straining to be joined… The tendrils intertwine with gentle undulations. Jake rocks with the direct contact between his nervous system and hers. The ultimate intimacy. They come together into a kiss and sink down on the bed of moss, and ripples of light spread out around them…”
The love-making between avatar-Jake and Neytiri is the culmination of their strange courtship. The joining of their neural queues is fundamentally involved; this is a joining of minds, of consciousnesses, as well as bodies. And as we see onscreen the outcome of this joining is a lifelong, irrevocable bond, cementing the culture’s monogamy.
But for a Na’vi warrior a queue is also a weakness. At the climax of the battle between RDA and the Na’vi there is a brutal fate for the warrior Tsu’tey, when a human soldier brutally cuts off his queue. The human has heard this is “worse than death” for a Na’vi. Perhaps it would be. Tsu’tey could no longer ride a direhorse or banshee. He would be excluded from sexual intimacy; this is a symbolic castration.
And, worse, Tsu’tey will suffer a deeper death than his ancestors. For his queue is also his connection to Pandora’s greatest mystery of all: Eywa. And through her, immortality.