fredgiblet wrote:1. Do the Loroi issue medals to soldiers for notable acts?
There are personal honors and citations, but they don't usually take the form of physical medals that are worn on uniforms. There are a few special insignia that may be painted onto a ship's hull or a unit's combat armor, but these tend to be unit citations rather than individual honors. They are intended to impress the enemy, rather than one's peers.
fredgiblet wrote:2. Does Trade have concepts for "Good" and "Evil" that would map to anything like the concepts for those words in English? Would the statement "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Be translatable in anything close to an accurate form?
Yes, Trade has a variety of words that could be used to translate that passage. If you are asking specifically about Loroi culture however, the passage above is steeped in Judeo-Christian/Muslim beliefs that the Loroi do not share (that evil is a living entity with a will of its own personified by a "Satan," and that mortal man is tainted by "Original Sin" and is therefore inherently corrupt). The Loroi mostly view good and evil in terms of "right and wrong", or rather "correct and incorrect" in terms of societal norms; this is, after all, a society for whom war is considered normal. The Loroi concept that could most closely be identified with our concept of evil is related to the word for "decay" and refers to corruption or descent into madness. "Triumph of evil" might be translated as "triumph of the enemy."
The Barsam concept of evil is as the absence of good, in the way that darkness is the absence of light, so for them evil literally is when good people do nothing. They would assume that "triumph of evil" is a metaphor (as the Barsam religious tales have villains who oppose the believers, but not an actual Satan).
Ktrain wrote:Since the Soia-liron species have a biochemestry different than humanity's, what are the biochemestries of the Umiak and other species like? Are they similar and use the same DNA/protein structures or are they unique or is there a mix. Another question, since biochemestries differ so much between Humans and Loroi, what is Alex going to eat because it is unlikely that both species derive sustenance from the same things (because proteins and enzymes are what break down carbohydrates/Loroi equivalent)?
The question of biochemistry usually comes up around the question of reproductive compatibility, and in that sense alien biochemistries are always going to be incompatible, even if they are very similar. Humans are accustomed to thinking of life in terms of other Earth organisms that evolved from the same primordial ancestors; the basic life processes of almost all Earth organisms are the same, and use the same genetic code base, and if you spliced genetic code from an oak into human, it would do
something (though perhaps nothing beneficial). Alien organisms evolve from different primordial ancestors, and may use the same or similar chemical building blocks, but the systems that organize them are almost certainly going to be very different. I'm not a biochemist and so I'm not prepared to invent a working alien system; I don't know whether there are chemical alternatives to DNA, or whether DNA is likely to be in every kind of self-replicating organism. But even if an alien system does use DNA as a code system, the code itself would be different; splicing an alien code segment into a human is unlikely to have meaningful, predictable effects (like splicing LISP code into a C program).
That said, the Soia-Liron system is very similar to Earth's chemically. Most of the intelligent species in the story (including the Soia-Liron) are "carbon-based" life forms that are built of the same basic chemical blocks. The processes that make these systems work will probably have significant differences, especially at higher levels of organization, but basic elements such as amino acids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates are likely to be common to all such systems. Alien foods that contain these basic elements can be nourishing as long as they don't contain substances that are outright poisonous, though how well such foods are handled by the digestive system will be a matter requiring some experimentation.
Every alien species that evolved on a separate world will have a separate code base. Many will be very similar, having evolved in similar conditions. Some will be notably different, such as the Golim who evolved on a high-gravity, high-pressure "super-earth" where concentrations of even normal elements can become toxic to most organisms. Most of the intelligent species are similar enough to exist in the same Loroi-standard environment with minimal life support (the Golim and Pipolsid being notable Union exceptions), and many are similar enough to be able to sample alien foods. The Nissek ambassador in particular shares stories of exotic eating habits ("the only way to truly understand one's enemy is to taste his flesh.")
The exceptions to the local evolutionary rule are the three biochemical systems left behind by each of the three ancient interstellar empires. The Morat and Delrias share the same ancestor, and so the same world of origin and the same genetic code base, and there are a few other organisms from the same homeworld that were spread around the region during their empire. The Dreiman empire did a lot of large-scale terraforming, and so there are still descendants of the introduced microorganisms that they used on many planets, though it will be many millions or even billions of years before these evolve on their own into more complex forms. And, of course, the Soia-Liron species that are found across the region (both intelligent species and a variety of domestic plants and animals) also share the same system.