Remember: Celestia had become home to sleazy profiteers. Even I could see how things might take a nasty turn.
Given a choice, the Mandasar children dearly loved to live in hives like this one: workers taking care of regular chores inside the house and around the farm; a warrior for heavy lifting and for protecting the others; a gentle to act as manager, to keep the books, to deal with customers and suppliers. They fit together as a family. The next time Counselor came into egg-heat, she and Zeeleepull would likely make a big happy clutch of hatchlings to carry on the tradition. (Egg-heat only happens once every nine years; the rest of the time, Mandasars are pretty mind-bogglingly platonic.)
But Counselor told me the sneaky slimy wheeler-dealers on Celestia didn’t care about Mandasars living balanced lives. Did warriors turn into mad dogs when you kept them apart from gentles and workers? Then they’d be perfect for guards at sweatshops and at factories that made illegal nano. Did workers turn into easy-to-control drones? That made them great for sixteen-hour shifts on assembly lines. Did gentles turn into brilliant intellectuals who didn’t fret about the effects of what they did? Then why not use them in disreputable think tanks or research institutes?
That’s what started the practice of "recruiting" on Celestia. According to Counselor, Mandasars were offered good money and benefits to sign on with various outfits, whereupon they’d be bundled off into single-caste units until their brains turned to one-track minds. The kids caught onto this pretty quick, and stopped signing up voluntarily. That’s when the recruitment process started to work more like old-time press-gangs: if you didn’t say yes to the soft sell, thugs would break into your house, gas the whole hive into unconsciousness, and take everyone away to "reorientation centers."
A month in isolation, Counselor said, and the poor Mandasars weren’t themselves anymore — the warriors would be spoiling for a fight, the workers would turn into zombies, and the gentles would be reduced to spoiled brats eager to show off how bright they were. Sure, they’d all remember the more balanced people they’d once been… but their pheromone-deprived brains just didn’t care. They were either too riled-up, too sluggish, or too giddy to be interested in changing back. Definitely, they’d never dream of complaining they were kidnapped and forced to become degenerate versions of their former selves.
In a way, they were like human adults who look back on childhood and say, "Sure, it was nice to be open and imaginative and alive, but we all have to grow up, don’t we?" Soon enough, the Mandasars stopped believing there’d ever been an alternative to their walled-up tunnel-vision lives.
But Counselor swore there were alternatives. This farming area, for instance, the Hollen Marsh: a big swath of reclaimed swampland, full of Mandasar kids living in small integrated hives. They watched out for each other with volunteer sentry patrols. The second that humans showed up, a militia of warriors would run off the intruders. That’s why Zeeleepull had charged me — he thought I was a recruiter, coming around with a bright smile and a pocketful of promises, but really spying out the territory for midnight press-gangs.
Counselor said there were other communities like theirs around Celestia: small-scale places where Mandasars could be themselves, farming or fishing or building useful things. But rumor had it that one by one, the communities were being wiped out… blitzed by recruitment gangs, families broken up and carted off to segregated isolation camps in wilderness parts of the planet. The local authorities were no help; a few took bribes from the recruiters, while the rest had been fooled by the stories Mandasars told after they’d been acclimatized: "Oh, it’s all a big fuss over nothing. We were stupid kids who wanted to live lazy unattached lives, but I feel so much better, now that I have a sense of purpose."
Well… Counselor had a sense of purpose too: to avoid the recruiters and live the way she wanted, with a healthy balanced brain. For a long time, the hive had been praying for someone to come and help them. They’d always pictured their savior as a grand and glorious queen, straight from Troyen… but maybe a blood-consort would do just as well.
Um.
12
TALKING OVER OUR PROBLEMS
When Counselor finished her story, all five of the kids sat smiling expectantly at me. Not human smiles, of course; Mandasars smile with their ears and whiskers, both sort of relaxing down in calm droops.
Pity I couldn’t smile too.
The truth is I’d never been so great as a blood-consort. Queen Verity said she married me mostly because of my delicious smell. Samantha claimed it was also a political thing, sending a message to Verity’s enemies that the queen was backed by my father and the full force of the Outward Fleet.
But once I became Verity’s husband, it turned out I didn’t have much to do. Smelling delicious doesn’t qualify you for being a general or cabinet minister or important jobs like that. Mostly I just hung around the palace being Verity’s bodyguard. (By then, sister Sam didn’t need me to be her bodyguard anymore. She’d assembled her own security team of warriors, humans, and even some Fasskisters. Anyway, she was getting busier and busier with secret diplomat stuff, "and it’s better, Edward, if you don’t know about that.")
As for me being Verity’s consort/husband/bodyguard, the queen once said, "You may not be a genius, Edward, but you’re the only honest creature I’ve ever known. I keep you around for inspiration. And curiosity value." It made me feel good when she talked like that… but being an inspiration doesn’t mean you’re good for much else. Definitely I wasn’t cut out for saving people.
(Memories of corpses flashed through my mind: Verity herself, head laid out on a platter. Samantha in a pool of blood. All the people on Willow, dressed up for their last party.)
But Counselor and the others still wore those big trusting smiles. Five minutes before, they had been cheering for Zeeleepull to snip me bloody. Now their black eyes gleamed as if I were topped off with a halo.
Or maybe, as if I were topped off with a crown. I’d been sitting in their midst, giving off the scent of queen’s venom, so why wouldn’t they start responding to me like royalty? If you smell like a queen, all their instincts tell them to treat you like you’re three-quarters divine. (Mandasars are a smart species, they really are, but they’re way too much at the mercy of their noses. Then again, they laugh at us humans and say we’re way too much at the mercy of our gonads… so maybe it balances out.)
"What do you think I can do?" I asked Counselor.
She looked at me in surprise, maybe wondering why I didn’t instantly have a plan to save all ten million kids on Celestia. "Do what is required," Counselor told me.
"Yes, but in the high queen’s court," I said, "Verity never started anything without consulting her privy council. Even a queen knows it’s smart to talk things over with people who’ve studied the situation."
Everyone smiled and nodded. Counselor went all bashful to be compared to a royal advisor, the workers beamed as if their darling grandchild had won a prize, and even Zeeleepull showed some real approval… like maybe I wasn’t just a stupid thug with queen-spill on my face.
"Well," said Counselor, "you’re with the navy, are you not? This is not a Technocracy world, but the fleet still wields great influence. If you summoned a dozen cruisers with tractor beams to stop ships from docking at our orbitals, the Celestian authorities would soon do whatever you asked. Even if the navy just took the name of everyone coming and going, there’d be great pressure on our government to remedy the situation immediately. Powerful people often don’t want it known when and why they come to this world. They value secrecy much more than they care about a few Mandasar employees."