Entry 19: Hymenopt
Distribution: The Hymenopt cladeworld is not definitely known, but it is believed to be one of the eighty worlds subjected to large-scale surface reshaping by the Zardalu, roughly twenty thousand years ago.
Hymenopt societies flourish today on eighteen of those worlds, having been transported there by the Zardalu and abandoned at the time of the Great Rising. Eight of these colonies subsequently became technologically advanced enough to achieve interplanetary travel. One Hymenopt world was an independent discoverer of the Bose Drive, but for cultural reasons it limited its use.
After the Great Rising the Hymenopt worlds were lost from spiral-arm communication, until finally they were rediscovered by the Decantil Survey and Census of territories of the Zardalu Communion.
Since then, slave Hymenopts have been taken to all worlds of the Communion, and also to dozens of planets of the Cecropia Federation. The total Hymenopt population is unknown, but certainly it is in the tens of billions.
Physical Characteristics: The Hymenopts in their own colonies contain six separate functional groups, designated as Regents, Recorders, Defenders, Feeders, Breeders, and Workers. There is a progression among these forms, in that Breeders following metamorphosis become Feeders, and finally Regents, while Defenders in the later stages of their lives become Recorders. Workers maintain the same form all their lives.
It should be noted that the only Hymenopts employed as slaves are the Workers. The others do not leave their colonies. Thus when another species of the spiral arm refers to “a Hymenopt,” that is by implication a Hymenopt Worker. The following physical description applies to them alone.
Hymenopt Workers are sterile female eight-legged arthropods. The paws on all limbs are prehensile and capable of the manipulation of small objects; however, only the four forelimbs are normally used for delicate work. Despite the fancied resemblance of the Hymenopt Workers to the Earth Hymenoptera, which led to their naming by Decantil survey biologists, the physiological similarity is at best superficial. The Hymenopts do, however, possess a tough exoskeleton and a powerful sting at the end of the rounded abdomen. (This, combined with their speed of movement, suggests that the slavery of a Hymenopt Worker is a matter of choice and habit, rather than force.)
Hymenopts see with a ring of simple (i.e., not compound) eyes, circling a smooth head. The need for all-around vision encourages them to remain upright on most occasions, although for rapid movement they revert to a horizontal position. The Hymenopts’ eyes are sensitive to a range of wavelengths from 0.3 to 1.0 micrometers, which more than spans the range of human optics. Their sensitivity to low light levels is superior to that of humans; this has led some exobiologists to offer an unconvincing identification of the Hymenopt cladeworld based on fainter sunlight and stellar spectral properties.
History: The earliest history of the Hymenopts has been lost, together with knowledge of their cladeworld. Today, the planet of Ker is generally considered to be the center of Hymenopt civilization, and it is certainly the principal storage point for Hymenopt records.
It was on Ker that the Bose Drive was discovered, seven thousand years ago. That invention led to a dominance of Ker among other Hymenopts which has never been challenged. According to the Ker archives, some form of Hymenopt oral history and race memory extends back sixty thousand generations. Since a breeding cycle lasts for seventy standard years, Hymenopts have therefore been intelligent, with a well-developed language, for over half a million years. By contrast, written records on Ker go back less than ten thousand.
Ker is the moving force, main market center, and principal beneficiary of the sale of Hymenopt slaves. Its inhabitants ar [Примечание изготовителя документа: часть текста потеряна]
CHAPTER 11
The following facts were deemed too anecdotal for the formality of the Universal Catalog (Subclass: Sapients). Few beings of the spiral arm, however, would dispute them:
AN ADULT HYMENOPT HAS REFLEXES TEN TIMES AS FAST AS ANY HUMANS.
A HYMENOPT CAN RUN A HUNDRED METERS IN LESS THAN TWO SECONDS.
USED IN CONCERT, A HYMENOPT’S EIGHT TRIPLE-JOINTED LEGS WILL PROPEL HER TEN METERS INTO THE AIR UNDER TWO STANDARD GRAVITIES.
THE RETRACTED YELLOW STING IN THE END OF A HYMENOPT’S STUBBY ABDOMEN CAN BE READIED IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND TO DELIVER STIMULANTS, ANESTHETICS, HALLUCINOGENS, OR LETHAL NEUROTOXINS. THEY ARE EFFECTIVE ON ALL KNOWN INTELLIGENT ORGANISMS.
WITH VOLUNTARILY REDUCED METABOLISM, A HYMENOPT CAN SURVIVE FOR FIVE MONTHS WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER; ENCYSTED, SHE WILL ENDURE FOR FOUR TIMES AS LONG.
A HYMENOPT IS AS INTELLIGENT AS A CECROPIAN OR A HUMAN, WITH MORE MENTAL STAMINA THAN EITHER.
Kallik, of course, knew all these things. And yet it never occurred to her that her own slave status was in any way unnatural. In fact, she thought it inevitable. Her race memory extended back well over ten thousand years, to the time when every Hymenopt had been a slave.
Hymenopt race memory lacked the precision of nerve-cell memory. The few billion bits available for its total storage reduced recollection to a mere caricature of the original direct experience. Yet the brain, insistent on offering race memories in the same format as other experiences, clothed the skeleton of recollection in a synthetic flesh of its own creation.
Thus, Kallik “remembered” the long enslavement of her species as a series of visual flashes; but no amount of effort would make those images detailed. If she made the attempt, the result was the product of her own imagination.
She could make a picture in her mind of the Zardalu, the land-cephalopod masters who had ruled the thousand worlds of the Zardalu Communion until the Great Rising. If she thought hard, she could make specific images: of stony beaks, big and strong enough to crush a Hymenopt’s body… but she could not see how they fitted to the Zardalu body. Of huge, round eyes… but they were floating free and disembodied, high above her head. Of hulking bodies, girthed with supporting straps and slick with fatty secretions that allowed the Masters to survive on land… but the legs that carried those bodies were vague shadow legs, undefined in size, color, or number.
She had only the most confused memory of the disappearance of the Zardalu: her mind fed back a whirl of flying bodies, a green fire, a world turned black, a sun exploding. And then, great calm; an absence of all Zardalu images.
For Kallik’s social class, the Great Rising and the vanishing of the tyrant Zardalu brought little change. She had been born a Worker; had she remained on the Homeworld she would have remained one. Her role would always have been Worker, rather than Regent, Recorder, Defender, Feeder, or Breeder. She had been bred for slavery, born for slavery, raised for slavery, and sold for slavery. Nothing made her so uncomfortable as a total absence of masters. She needed them — humans, Cecropians, or Hymenopts.
The disappearance of Lang and Rebka stimulated her to frantic activity. She moved at once to make a low-altitude survey of the surface of Glister, traversing the slowly rotating planetoid on a path that would allow a close inspection of every square meter.
The survey took over an hour. It was wasted time. Kallik remained convinced that Glister was hollow, but the sphere showed no trace of external structure. Nothing suggested a way to reach the hidden interior. If fact, if Kallik had not seen, with her own multiple pairs of black eyes, that sparkling cloud absorbed into the surface, she would have judged Glister’s exterior totally impermeable.