Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (12 page)

"The ceremony was very beautiful, moving, and interesting," we replied. "In more ways than one, as it happened. We would greatly appreciate it if you would convey our personal gratitude to Thaddeus and our appreciation of his preparations and steadfastness."

James smiled. "I'll be very happy to do so, but if you would like to meet him personally, I can make some time in the schedule?"

Though James had not met us physically until today, we had worked together so long he had developed an intuitive understanding of us.

We nodded. "Thank you, so much. We have another thought, concerning the banquet seating arrangements?"

"Uh, yes. What I imagine discomforts you is the potential discomfort of those around you, am I correct?"

It is a wonder how this alien appears to read our minds. We rested a pincer on his shoulder, which we know to be a gesture of comfort and camaraderie among humans.

"You are thinking of changing them, given what happened in the throne room. But given that the integrity of the ceremony is likely to be altered, one way or another, and we regret this as much as you, we would find it most interesting and entirely comfortable if the princess remains as placed. In such case, any alteration would be entirely
her
doing, and not
ours
in fear of what she might do. We would not want to give or appear to take offense to anyone. But, of course, the comfort of the empress would be the overriding concern."

He nodded. "Then we won't alter the seating arrangement on your account. Despite her discomfort, Marie sees these things as part of her heir's education. She does not give up hope easily."

We knew the history of the empress' efforts at succession and patted James' shoulder again. If we could be of some assistance, we would.

He smiled. "Well, let us go to your quarters." He gestured to a large cylindrical structure that had been set up in the center of an athletic field. In its core would be a room of a few meters diameter in which a magnetic field gradient would thrust the water molecules of our bodies upward, and so cancel much of the awful gravity of this planet. We would have three hours to rest our feet before the ceremonial banquet.

But not our minds. The grumpy empress was beloved, and while she had no legislative power, we thought her assent or opposition would determine what the humans would do. How would her difficult daughter affect that? And was there anything we could do about it?

The banquet was a traditional human ceremony in which we had wanted to participate, despite our very different sustenance procedures. It preserves, in a way, much of this race's antecontact culture. It is the rare alien art form that our race can appreciate in its symmetry, its choreography, and its orchestration of a wide variety of senses. The underlying purpose of all this runs slightly afoul of a difference in our biology, but that is beside the point.

Our royalty sat together with theirs at the head of the table. While the placement and service were formal, there were no conversational scripts.

"Nine hundred and seventy-eight million years, with no meaningful change?" Empress Marie asked. "How does that feel?"

We clicked and nodded. She knew how to interpret that. "We have personally experienced only a hundred thousand or so of that, allowing for frame of reference changes and hibernation. And much of that time is filled with experiences like this, which are a feast for the appetite of curiosity."

We shall forgive ourselves for our cleverness in constructing a human metaphor.

She smiled, "I'm happy you are pleased. Our staff lives for such ceremonies, and takes these anachronisms very seriously. It is quite an art form for them. I am a constant part of this, like the walls of this building," she sighed, "but the staff change every fifteen or twenty years, to give others a chance, and so the creativity is always fresh."

We studied her. Human biological science had long since arrested their physical development at what was approximately thirty-four years of age. But while their bodies renewed themselves, their minds continued to accumulate experience. And this showed for those who have studied their faces and body language.

"You have done many of these," we observed.

She hesitated a moment, likely to query some database.

"Thirty-three thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight state banquets." She shrugged her shoulders. "With the help of Earthmind, of course, I can remember each of them in every detail. Seven hundred twenty-three years ago, a server tripped and spilled seven main courses when we entertained a Kleth ambassador at our Martian estate." She smiled. "I was quite amused, but, of course, didn't let on. I'm afraid I'm less of a poker face now."

"Oh, Mom's still pretty good at it," Princess Ann injected.

It was a fact we had not thought to research. The one thousand one hundred and thirty-eight years she had been empress is a trivial star-frame time interval for a space-hive-queen. But it was now clear to us how much of an endurance test this might be for a human. Empress Marie was weary. She alternated between moments of arch perkiness and stoic passivity.

"This isn't how you normally dine, is it?" a young woman next to the princess asked us, sounding casual.

Our antennae stiffened. This was a potential disaster. Intelligence flowed into us. The speaker was a Lady Linda Sanchez. She was a lady in waiting and friend of Princess Ann. She was connected to... Chaos! Her great-great uncle was a populist xenophobe.

As this information flowed into us, we felt the touch of James on our left rear leg. James was the only human we had told about royal feeding. Human beings were not universally sophisticated and the majority still thought of their own species instincts as moral laws of the universe. It had been James' judgment, and ours, that it would be very difficult to obtain the support we needed if royal feeding became common knowledge.

Of course, if we had not been so clever as to advise James on how to handle the banquet seating, this situation would not have arisen. Well, we had made our hive and now we had to lay our eggs in it.

"There are differences, of course. We have a grazing area with fruits and seed plants. We pick what we choose to eat, cut it into quite small pieces, and inhale it, the solid substances being diverted to our digestive system by a sort of screen. The details of our anatomy are in our cultural exchange data if you wish to know more."

"I do," Lady Sanchez said. "You eat your children, don't you?"

"Lady Sanchez," James said. "This is not appropriate for this time and place."

Empress Marie seemed frozen.

"I won't be corrected by a bug lover. Anathor, will you answer the question or will you continue your concealment?"

"Linda!" Princess Ann exclaimed, "not now!"

"Are you one of them, too?" Sanchez asked. "My mistake. We the people of Earth and its worlds need to know the truth about these monsters."

"Linda! I'm your friend."

"Ann," Empress Marie spoke at last. "You were used." She hesitated, then sighed. "We don't get to have friends."

"We?" Ann said. "We?"

James looked at the empress and we followed his gaze. Her shoulders sagged, her head lowered, she seemed infinitely tired.

Had the only concern been the relations between the humans and the Children of Light, I would have answered the question in detail; indeed, we would not have omitted the information in the first place and likely would have had our meetings in some distant place of no concern to xenophobes. But there was much more at stake here.

Somehow information had gotten out. If not from James, where? The galactic library node at Proteus? That had been informed before our visit and its caretaker mind had agreed on discretion. There had been no previous queries about our species.

We looked around. The man seated next to Lady Sanchez was deep in conversation with the woman next to him, and appeared not to have heard anything we were saying. Ms. Omata, seated next to her grandfather James, could be trusted.

"Lady Sanchez," we started, "in our prehistory, we evolved a far more collective existence than your race has. We share our sense data and thoughts more readily through the electric organs we evolved. Our sense of individuality is much different...."

"Queen Anathor, you do not have to answer this... impertinent question," Empress Marie said, imperial ice in her voice. "Lady Sanchez is no longer part of the royal household and it is our pleasure that she be escorted to the entrance without delay."

"Mom!"

"I'll scream!" Linda Sanchez said as men dressed in dark blue approached her.

One of the men behind her held up a soft ball on a stick and nodded to James. A sound canceler; no such scream would be heard more than a few meters away.

"Princess Ann," we said. "The possibility seems very great that Lady Sanchez' friendship with you was not sincere. She is of a family with a great dislike for non-humans, and her loyalty to that family is great."

"My loyalty to
humanity
is great, Anathor. Why don't you show us this feeding? Let people see what you really are! Will you answer the question or will we answer it for you?"

Empress Marie gestured to the men in dark blue. They moved forward. What would this scene look like to billions of human viewers?

"I beg your peace, Your Royal Highness," we said quickly, "but those do appear to be the choices. We do not ask that you tolerate this, but only that you delay what you must do for a few minutes, for the sake of appearances."

Taking a few moments of shocked silence as assent, we flew on. "Our social evolution preceded the evolution of tool use and the expansion of our minds to comprehend the universe. Our brains are given very strong rewards for following these presentient instincts; and those of us who choose to maintain a corporeal existence, for tradition's sake, also choose to tamper with these instincts in only very limited ways, for our intention is to be who we are. The royal feeding is part of that inheritance."

Everyone froze, including the escorts who had come up behind Lady Sanchez.

"We are neither like your hive animals, nor like your human communities, but are somewhere between. Our children, with whom you have been eating and conversing, have few individual goals. They are not robots, and they are not simply parts of our collective body, but they are not as independently motivated individuals as you are. You have no analog to this among your life forms or, we understand, nor any you have encountered. We ask that you set aside such analogies as you can and take us for what we are."

"Only one of us is female, and lays eggs. This hive-queen is strongly protected. The hive, in presentient days, did not allow her to leave the hive to forage on her own. Over millions of your years, the hives evolved a simple system to feed the queen and fertilize her eggs. One of their members would gorge himself, then offer his fattened body to the hive-queen. The urge to do so was very strong, and the reward during the process was also very strong, perhaps similar to what you feel in your mating act."

Princess Ann suppressed a giggle and the color of Lady Sanchez' face reddened substantially. We had, by accident, touched on something meaningful to them.

"In a space-hive, with a constant population, and no reasons for the hive-queen to not forage on her own, the question of royal feeding does not arise."

In this, we were being disingenuous. Our hive did not spend all its time in space, and there were needs for replacements from time to time. Nor, when our biochemistry decided it was time, would a hive-queen deny to any of her children so anointed the one great individual joy of their existence. But we were truthful enough about this hive-queen's recent history.

Lady Sanchez' glistening eyes locked onto us. We could taste her hatred in the air around us, emotion having caused a sweat that overpowered whatever inhibitors she wore. It was an incongruously lovely taste.

"Tell us how you do it. Or if not you, as you say, your other hive-queens do it. Tell us. You bite your children open and suck them dry. That's what you do, isn't it?"

"In so many words. The bite of the hive-queen is accompanied by fluids that produce euphoria, anesthetize, and digest the organs of the chosen, except for the nerves and brain, which experiences the euphoria, and the seminal cells.

"The hive child's head remains conscious for several minutes, communicating the joy it feels." The hive experiences what we suppose, in human terms, a group orgasm would feel like. But we did not describe this in our literature; there is something to be said for an economy of information under such circumstances.

"And if you don't have a fattened hive child handy, you'll take something else," Lady Sanchez snapped.

"That is not biologically possible," we said. "What made you think that?"

Lady Sanchez looked distracted and confused.

"Records have been found on other worlds. Your censored galactic library does not have a monopoly on information."

So
that
was the source of their information; propaganda from a race of conquerors our ancestors pacified a billion years ago, one that was unfortunately more like humans than us.

James sighed. "Milady perhaps is receiving information, from sources she trusts, that it is indeed not biologically possible."

"Do you have any more questions, Lady Sanchez?" we asked.

She shook her head and rose to be escorted out, but with a look back at a shocked Princess Ann that said their relationship was not entirely a hoax. Perhaps it had been sacrificed for too little. So we hoped.

Empress Marie laughed, a deep, cynical, bitter laugh. "Now you all should have a very good idea of what 'figurehead' means. If I command that you now finish your
meal and make pleasant conversation, will everyone get up and go? Or, if I command you to get up and go, will that then ensure that everyone finish what our culinary artists have tried so hard to make and which is now no longer so fresh?"

"Mother!" Princess Ann exclaimed.

"As you wish, your Majesty," we said, forked a small morsel of fish, placed it in our mouth, and sucked it down.