She stared at him; even the bulky goggles could not hide her new respect and even fear. “You really mean to do it, then.”
“I made the sacrifice of my time and energy. I expect results, Doctor.”
“But it’s kidnapping. You’re talking about breeding a slave race.”
Afriel shrugged with contempt. “You’re juggling words, Doctor. I’ll cause this colony no harm. I may steal some of its workers’ labor while they obey my own chemical orders, but that tiny theft won’t be missed. I admit to the murder of one egg, but that is no more a crime than a human abortion. Can the theft of one strand of genetic material be called ‘kidnapping’? I think not. As for the scandalous idea of a slave race — I reject it out of hand. These creatures are genetic robots. They will no more be slaves than are laser drills or cargo tankers. At the very worst, they will be our domestic animals.”
Mirny considered the issue. It did not take her long. “It’s true. It’s not as if a common worker will be staring at the stars, pining for its freedom. They’re just brainless neuters.”
“Exactly, Doctor.”
“They simply work. Whether they work for us or the Swarm makes no difference to them.”
“I see that you’ve seized on the beauty of the idea.”
“And if it worked,” Mirny said, “if it worked, our faction would profit astronomically.”
Afriel smiled genuinely, unaware of the chilling sarcasm of his expression. “And the personal profit, Doctor… the valuable expertise of the first to exploit the technique.” He spoke gently, quietly. “Ever see a nitrogen snowfall on Titan? I think a habitat of one’s own there — larger, much larger than anything possible before… A genuine city, Galina, a place where a man can scrap the rules and discipline that madden him… ”
“Now it’s you who are talking defection, Captain-Doctor.”
Afriel was silent for a moment, then smiled with an effort. “Now you’ve ruined my perfect reverie,” he said. “Besides, what I was describing was the well-earned retirement of a wealthy man, not some self-indulgent hermitage… there’s a clear difference.” He hesitated. “In any case, may I conclude that you’re with me in this project?”
She laughed and touched his arm. There was something uncanny about the small sound of her laugh, drowned by a great organic rumble from the Queen’s monstrous intestines… “Do you expect me to resist your arguments for two long years? Better that I give in now and save us friction.”
“Yes.”
“After all, you won’t do any harm to the Nest. They’ll never know anything has happened. And if their genetic line is successfully reproduced back home, there’ll never be any reason for humanity to bother them again.”
“True enough,” said Afriel, though in the back of his mind he instantly thought of the fabulous wealth of Betelgeuse’s asteroid system. A day would come, inevitably, when humanity would move to the stars en masse, in earnest. It would be well to know the ins and outs of every race that might become a rival.
“I’ll help you as best I can,” she said. There was a moment’s silence. “Have you seen enough of this area?”
“Yes.” They left the Queen’s chamber.
“I didn’t think I’d like you at first,” she said candidly. “I think I like you better now. You seem to have a sense of humor that most Security people lack.”
“It’s not a sense of humor,” Afriel said sadly. “It’s a sense of irony disguised as one.”
There were no days in the unending stream of hours that followed. There were only ragged periods of sleep, apart at first, later together, as they held each other in free-fall. The sexual feel of skin and body became an anchor to their common humanity, a divided, frayed humanity so many light-years away that the concept no longer had any meaning. Life in the warm and swarming tunnels was the here and now; the two of them were like germs in a bloodstream, moving ceaselessly with the pulsing ebb and flow. Hours stretched into months, and time itself grew meaningless.
The pheromonal tests were complex, but not impossibly difficult. The first of the ten pheromones was a simple grouping stimulus, causing large numbers of workers to gather as the chemical was spread from palp to palp. The workers then waited for further instructions; if none were forthcoming, they dispersed. To work effectively, the pheromones had to be given in a mix, or series, like computer commands; number one, grouping, for instance, together with the third pheromone, a transferral order, which caused the workers to empty any given chamber and move its effects to another. The ninth pheromone had the best industrial possibilities; it was a building order, causing the workers to gather tunnelers and dredgers and set them to work. Others were annoying; the tenth pheromone provoked grooming behavior, and the workers’ furry palps stripped off the remaining rags of Afriel’s clothing. The eighth pheromone sent the workers off to harvest material on the asteroid’s surface, and in their eagerness to observe its effects the two explorers were almost trapped and swept off into space.
The two of them no longer feared the warrior caste. They knew that a dose of the sixth pheromone would send them scurrying off to defend the eggs, just as it sent the workers to tend them. Mirny and Afriel took advantage of this and secured their own chambers, dug by chemically hijacked workers and defended by a hijacked airlock guardian. They had their own fungal gardens to refresh the air, stocked with the fungus they liked best, and digested by a worker they kept drugged for their own food use. From constant stuffing and lack of exercise the worker had swollen up into its replete form and hung from one wall like a monstrous grape.
Afriel was tired. He had been without sleep recently for a long time; how long, he didn’t know. His body rhythms had not adjusted as well as Mirny’s, and he was prone to fits of depression and irritability that he had to repress with an effort. “The Investors will be back sometime,” he said. “Sometime soon.”
Mirny was indifferent. “The Investors,” she said, and followed the remark with something in the language of the springtails, which he didn’t catch. Despite his linguistic training, Afriel had never caught up with her in her use of the springtails’ grating jargon. His training was almost a liability; the springtail language had decayed so much that it was a pidgin tongue, without rules or regularity. He knew enough to give them simple orders, and with his partial control of the warriors he had the power to back it up. The springtails were afraid of him, and the two juveniles that Mirny had tamed had developed into fat, overgrown tyrants that freely terrorized their elders. Afriel had been too busy to seriously study the springtails or the other symbiotes. There were too many practical matters at hand.
“If they come too soon, I won’t be able to finish my latest study,” she said in English.
Afriel pulled off his infrared goggles and knotted them tightly around his neck. “There’s a limit, Galina,” he said, yawning. “You can only memorize so much data without equipment. We’ll just have to wait quietly until we can get back. I hope the Investors aren’t shocked when they see me. I lost a fortune with those clothes.”