“We must stay here as we were told,” Max concluded, his squarish face grimly set, and there was in his eyes a hint of disapproval for the azi who suggested a violation of those instructions. Jim caught it and bit off an answer, turned and hesitated in the door, irresolution gnawing at him with a persistence that made his belly hurt. The hive wanted: Raen would have been disturbed at an urgent message from the hive. She needed to know.
And he was charged simply to keep the house in order.
That was not, now, what she needed. The look that had been in her eyes when she left him had been one of worry, anxiousness, he thought wretchedly, because she must leave him in charge, himwho could not understand the half of what he ought.
He looked back, shivering. “Max,” he said.
The big guard-azi waited. “Orders?” Max asked, that being the way Raen had arranged things.
“I’m going upstairs. You’re in charge down here.”
“She said you were to work.”
“She said I was to take care of things. I’m going upstairs. I have something to do for her. You’re in charge down here. That’s the order I’m giving you. I’m responsible. I’ll admit to it.”
Max inclined his head, accepting, and Jim strode back the way he had come, across the devastation of the garden, past the domestic azi in the kitchen, who was mopping up the broken dish—past the comp centre, the screens of which flashed with messages which waited on Raen. The walls vibrated with song. Warriors hulked here and there in the dark places of the hall. A majat-azi scampered out of the farther doors, female, naked, bearing a blue light that glowed feebly in the shadow. She grinned and traded fingers across his shoulder as she passed, and he shuddered at the madness in that laughing face. A male followed, younger than left the pens to any other service, and the same wildness was in his eyes. A whole stream of them began to pour up from the basement with a Worker behind them, fluting orders for haste.
He fled in horror, lest he be swept up with them by accident, herded with them into the dark pit outside. He ran the stairs, hurled himself into the bedroom, saw it safely vacant and locked the doors.
It was a moment before he could unknot his clenched hands and arms and straighten. One part of him did not want to go farther…would rather seek the corner of the room and tuck up there and cease.
Like the lower azi, when they reached the limit of their functions.
Raen needed more than that. This tall, gaunt Kontrin had come, and talked with her, and she had been distressed: the strange born-man azi had distressed her further. He under-stood that there were connections he could not comprehend, that perhaps she was somewhere with him, who was of her kind—and that in hazardous things an azi of his training was useless.
Keep the house in order.
It was far from what she needed, but it was the limit of his function. He had seen betas, who could make up what to do: Kontrin, whose function he could not conceive, but who simply knew. He had seen the pens and knew himself.
Dimly he realised that if Raen were lost, he would be terminated: someone had told him that they did not pass on their azi; but he failed to take alarm at that. He thought should that happen, he would simply sit down and wait for termination, out of interest in other things, without further use. There was an unfamiliar tightness in his throat that had bided there most of the day, a tenseness that would not go away.
Be calm, old tapes echoed in his mind. Calm is always good. When you cannot be calm, you are useless. A useless azi is nothing. Turn of all disturbance. Instruction will come. You are blameless if you are calm and waiting for instruction.
Next came the punishment, if he let the emotion well up, the inbuilt nausea. He was shaking, torn between the tightness in his throat and the sickness which heaved at his stomach, and knew that if he let the one go, the other would follow. He had no time for this. He fought down the hysteria with a simple exercise of self-distraction, refusing to think in the direction of his feelings. Calm, calm, calm is good. Good is happy. Happy is useful. Good azi are always useful.
He busied himself at once, taking the deepstudy unit out of the closet, opening the case with the tapes. Calm, calm, calm,he insisted to himself, for his hand shook as he deliberately chose the tapes with the black cases, the forbidden ones. The disobedience increased the pain in his stomach. For her, he kept telling himself; and, Good azi are always useful, playing one tape against the other. If he had what was in her tapes he would know what she knew; if he knew what she knew, he would understand what to do.
He propped up a divider from the case, contrived a way to brace the stack which he made in the play-slot, for they were far more than the machine was designed to hold. Focus the mind, concentrate only on the physical action: that was the means to keep calm in crisis. Never mind where the action was tending; it was only necessary to do, until all was done.
He prepared the machine. He prepared the chair, throwing over it a blanket for padding; last of all he prepared himself, stripped completely, smoothed the blanket so that there would be not the least wrinkle to crease his skin during the long collapse, and found the pill bottle where he had left it last, in the bath. He sat down then, with the pill clenched in his teeth, attached the leads. Last of all he drew the edges of the blanket over himself and swallowed the pill, waiting for the numbness to begin.
I shall change, he thought, and panic rose in him, for he had always liked the individual he was, and this was self-murder.
He felt the haziness begin, bade himself goodbye, and threw the switch—composed his arms loosely to his sides and leaned back, waiting.
The machine cycled in.
He was not unconscious; he was hyperconscious, but not of things around him—gripped and shaken by the alienness that poured in.
Attitudes. Information. Contradictions. The minds of immortals, the creators of the Reach. He absorbed until body began to scream out distantly to mind that there was hazard, and went on absorbing.
He could not want to stop, save in the small pauses where instruction ceased. Then he would try to scream for help. But he was not truly conscious, and body would not respond at all. The stream began again, and volition ceased.
ii
“Meth-maren,” Mother intoned, distraught. “Find, find this queen.” Workers soothed Her; Drones sang their dismay. There was/had been impression of separation, the hive-consciousness that had been established for a time stretched thin, soaring as in flight.
Then disaster.
Workers laboured, frantically. The hive reached out and sought Meth-maren hive, one with it. Workers died in the stress, jaws worn away, bodies exhausted, and the husks were caught up and carried away as the work boiled forward. Azi fell beneath their burdens and drank and rested and staggered back to their work, to die there.
There was in the hive the frightened taste of a green scout, who had fallen to Warriors. Disorientation was in its hive also, the memory of Meth-marens of ages past, before the sun had risen at such an angle and the world had changed colours.
And it in turn had tasted the minds of golds, who tasted of reds, whose fierceness now had a taint of hesitancy, less push and more of fear.
“Kill,” the Warrior portion of blue-Mind urged. “Restore health. Kill the unhealthy.”
Drones sang of memory, and the balance of the hive shifted toward Warrior-thoughts and shifted back again to Mother, as She wrenched it to Herself, fierceness greater than theirs, for it embraced eggs, survival.
BUILD, the command went out, and the Workers hastened in frenzy.