"Um, rise," I said. Which didn’t sound very regal. I tried to remember how Queen Verity talked to her subjects when she held court. "Rise," I said again with my deepest, most gracious voice. "Rise and let us converse." Counselor was the first to perk up. She’d only caught a slight whiff of the venom… not like Zeeleepull, who’d practically had his nose rubbed in it while I held his snout to my face. No wonder he was slow getting up off the floor. The workers, of course, were busy being cowed — opening one eyelid for a quick peek at me, then closing the eye fast if they saw I was looking their way. You can never tell with workers whether they’re really as intimidated as they seem, or if they’re just putting on a show of being menial. Maybe the workers don’t know either.
"Were you really the high queen’s blood-consort?" Counselor asked in a hushed voice.
"Yes. I really was." For eight whole years, till Verity got killed and the war began… but I didn’t say that. I also didn’t mention she’d had six other consorts at the same time.
"What are you doing here?" Counselor asked.
"I told you: my escape pod landed in your canal."
"So you didn’t… seek us out?"
Counselor suddenly had a hopeful look on her face, enough to break my heart. I could imagine the kids on Celestia, cut off from their home for twenty years and looking to the sky every night, wondering if anyone would ever come to tell them, "We love you and want you back." They’d have a terrible time if they actually did go back to Troyen — with their gutter-baby accents and their attachment to dreadful fake antiques — but they didn’t know they’d be out of place. As out of place as they were now. "Things are still bad back home," I said. "When I left a week and a half ago, the war was as fierce as ever." Not that I paid much attention to the fighting… but the other observers on the moonbase would have told me if the war had ended.
"Yet you recently had contact with… a royal person," Counselor said. "The smell on your face is fresh."
"Yes," I nodded, "but that queen is dead now." When I realized how bad that sounded, I quickly added, "Someone else killed her. It’s really complicated. A ship was trying to bring her here, but things went wrong."
"So you’ve come in her stead?" Counselor asked, all shining eager. "To save us from the recruiters?"
"Um. Hmm."
Counselor sounded so beamingly hopeful, I didn’t want to ask, "What recruiters?" That would dash her down hard, like I’d come all this way, then didn’t know the first thing about her troubles. From the sound of her voice, I could tell she wanted me to be a great savior, fallen out of the sky to rescue her hive from danger. So I didn’t open my mouth till I’d picked my words carefully. "Talk to me about these recruiters," I said. "Tell me everything."
And she did.
Counselor started with something I already knew: despite all those human settlers twenty years ago, Celestia still didn’t belong to the Technocracy. Then she told me a secret: over the past two decades, Celestia had become one of the Technocracy’s most valuable assets, precisely because it’d never signed the Technocracy charter.
It turned out the humans Dad brought to Celestia weren’t interested in clearing a few grubby acres and trying to grow butternut squash. Instead, they wanted to grow huge acres of cash: for example, by establishing big secretive banks outside the Technocracy regulatory system. Places where wealthy Tech-citizens could store money without worrying about taxes or subpoenas. Celestia also became a meeting ground for folks making shady deals… especially under-the-table arrangements with alien species. One group of newly arrived entrepreneurs took up catering to tourists with tastes that would be illegal elsewhere; others built factories that spewed pollution or exploited workers in ways the Technocracy would never allow.
In other words, Counselor said, Celestia had become a place where big rich important people could do sneaky slimy things — all the things they couldn’t get away with inside the boring old Technocracy. (Of course, those big rich important people still lived in the Technocracy, where life was safe and civilized. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t milk the system, then avoid its inconveniences?)
So Celestia was a nice little planet, but also your basic swill hole. People and things got dumped here. The Mandasars were a prime example: brought in as a ruse for colonization, then kept here because the place didn’t have fuddy-duddy laws about raising kids properly. Folks in this star system wouldn’t demand you build "quality orphanages" or find teachers who knew what they were talking about.
The kids had grown up without a lot of attention… but that wasn’t so bad, Counselor said, when they were raised in big schools that crammed a lot of children into one place. Mandasars don’t mind being crammed. In fact, I knew it was good for them to be chucked in tight together, warriors and workers and gentles.
If you want the honest truth, they thrive on each other’s smell.
This is something I learned in Queen Verity’s palace: a crucial fact of Mandasar biology. They need to be surrounded by people of other castes. Every waking second, for instance, a warrior gives off a vinegary perfume (Musk A) that stimulates workers and gentles to be a bit… well, aggressive isn’t the right word. Sharp. Keen. Alert and ambitious.
It’s a pheromone that works directly on receptors in the Mandasar brain. It’s not psychological, it’s purely physical; for Mandasars, inhaling that aroma is like snorting a psychoactive drug. Only it’s more like absorbing a vitamin their brains need to work properly — without regular exposure to warrior musk, workers and gentles start to go funny in the head.
It’s the same for other castes. Workers give off a scent that keeps warriors and gentles more stable, more patient; and the fragrance of a gentle makes warriors and workers more thoughtful in both senses of the word — they reflect more on what they’re doing, and are more considerate about how their actions affect other people.
Separate the castes from each other, and their brain chemicals skitter out of balance. If you keep warriors stuck in barracks with other warriors day after day, the buildup of warrior musk keeps them hair-trigger ready for a fight… but they have no patience, and they don’t think much about what they’re asked to do. That’s great if you want bloodthirsty killing machines who don’t question their orders. In the long run, though, it doesn’t make for a smart dependable army. Or for productive law-abiding citizens.
The same with other castes. Make a segregated camp that only contains workers, and you get a drove of plodding drudges. Verity told me you could make them work long hours for zero pay, but they had no initiative and never used their wits to deal with unexpected problems.
Ditto for gentles. If they only hung around with other gentles, they ended up all brains and no common sense: ivory-tower types who were great at coming up with ideas, inventions and theories, but lousy at judging priorities. They’d be just as happy brainstorming new ways to kill people as they would be inventing medicines or things to make life better. Basically, they turned into amoral geniuses, ready to tackle any problem so long as it was interesting, and to hell with the long-term consequences.
Counselor said the kids on Celestia knew about pheromones too. They wouldn’t be whole people unless they lived in hives with all three castes in close quarters; it was the only way to keep every part of their brains wide-awake and functioning. But this bit of biology wasn’t common knowledge amongst outside races… not till those "trained human caregivers" on, Celestia began tending Mandasar children. That’s when the secret got out, and the human world started contemplating the possibilities.