There was another stirring, from a quarter she had not expected. She did look. It was old Moth, who had been an ornament in Council for years, representative of little Eft-sept of the Tern, silent whatever happened, siding with any majority, sleeping through many a session.
“There has been no vote,” Moth said.
“But there was,” said Eron. “Moth, you must have been napping.” There was laughter, obedient, from all Eron’s partisans, and it had many voices.
Suddenly Eldest rose, Lian, leaning on the rail. He was not the joke that Moth was. There was quiet. “There was no vote;’ he repeated. No one laughed. “Evidently, Thel, you have counted your numbers and decided a vote of the full Council would be superfluous.” Lian looked toward Raen, blear-eyed, his face working to focus. “Raen a Sul hant Meth-maren. My apologies and condolences, from the Family.”
“Sit down, Eldest,” said Eron.
The old man briefly pressed Moth’s hand, and Moth left her place and descended the steps toward the center where Raen stood. She had difficulty with her robes and the steps, and tottered as she walked. There was displeasure voiced, but no one moved to help or to stop her.
“Procedures,” Moth said over the speakers, when she had gained the floor and faced them. “There are procedures. You have not followed them.”
“I will tell you something,” said Eldest from his place above. He activated his microphone. “It’s a dangerous precedent, this destruction of a House, this . . . assumption of consent. I’ve lived since the fast ship came into the Reach, and I’ll tell you this: I saw early that men couldn’t live here without being corrupted.”
“Sit down,” someone shouted at him.
“The hives,” Eldest said, “had a wealth to be taken; but humanity and the hive-mind weren’t compatible. A probe came down on Cerdin; it came into red-hive possession, the crew held captive, such of them as survived. Celia probe. The hives gained knowledge. There was Delia, then, that got through. Back in human space there was talk about sterilising Cerdin before the plague could spread. But suddenly the hives changed their attitude. They wanted trade, wanted us, wanted—one ship, they said: one hive for humans, and the Reach set aside for themselves.”
There was sullen silence. Moth touched Raen’s sleeve, pressed her wrist with a soft-fleshed band. Someone else started to his feet, a Delt; Yls Ren-barant stopped him. The silence continued, deadly. Lian looked about him, uncertainly, and pursed his lips.
“We tricked them.” Lian’s voice, quavering, resumed. “We brought in human eggs and the equipment to handle them. Half a billion eggs, all ready to grow. And we set up where this building stands, and we set up our labs and we started breeding while our one ship made its trade runs and the others of us who had skill at communication developed agreements with the hives.” His voice grew stronger. “Now do you suppose, fellow Councillors, that the hives didn’t know by then what we were about? Of course they saw. But the human animal is a mystery to them, and we kept it that way. They saw a hive-structure. They saw an increasing number of young and a growing social order which well-agreed with their own pattern. We planned it that way. They still had no idea what a non-collective intelligence was, or what it could do. Just one large hive, this of ours, all one mind. They knew better, perhaps, in theory. But the pattern of their own thinking wouldn’t let them interpret what they saw.
“When they began to learn, we frightened them with our differences. Frightened them most with the concept of dying. They looked into our chemistry and understood the process, worked out a cure for old age. They had finally gained the dimmest notion, you see, of what our individuality is. The hives are millions of years old. Do you reckon why the majat were worried about our dying? Because among majat, there are only four persons . . . red, green, gold, and blue. Those are their units of individuality. These persons have worked out how to deal with each other over millions of years. They’re accustomed to stability, to memory, to eternity. How could they deal with a series of short-lived humans? So they cured death . . . for some of us, for those of us fortunate enough to be born Kontrin. The beta generations, the product of our cargo of eggs . . . they go on dying at the human rate, but we live forever. Economic ruin, if there were many of us. So even we Kontrin kill each other off from time to time. The majat used to find that shocking.