Chapter 10
Ten
“History wasn’t always history. Once upon a time it was just people making mistakes, the same as they are today. Don’t give it too much power over you.”
—Mary Dunlavy
In the home of Fetch and Carry, talking to a historian
I STARED AT ANNALIST. HE TURNED his face away.
“It is my great shame that my lineage was involved with the original exile of the cuckoos. As their descendant, I am among those tasked with remembering the great betrayal, and what we did to our own people—for the cuckoos were our people in those days. We were all one hive, and my lineage was part of its destruction.”
This is why we listened when he approached us, said Fetch, and I realized with a start that she was speaking inside my head.
I’d grown so accustomed to this world of telepaths communicating out loud that I’d almost forgotten she could do that.
I flashed her a sidelong glance. She had positioned herself behind him; he couldn’t see her white-out eyes.
He knew what he spoke of. He knew what would be done to you, because he knew what had been done to your people. And he knew what you could do for us.
I tried to focus on Annalist. He was radiating guilt and regret so loudly, it was a ringing in my ears, in the deep space that has nothing to do with actual sound.
“It’s nice to meet you, Annalist,” I said. “What can you tell me about cuckoos?”
“Nothing, unless I first explain the collective. Carry, how much time do you have remaining on your afternoon leisure?”
“Not long, Annalist,” she replied. “Fetch and I will be required to return to our duties shortly. Sarah will remain here. It isn’t safe for her to return with us, and we cannot risk the safety of a queen.”
Fetch flinched at the very thought, looking momentarily sick to her stomach.
I wanted to object to the idea of being left behind, alone in an unfamiliar world, but I couldn’t find a good reason.
She was right that I’d be safer here, behind closed doors and walls laced with anti-telepathy fungus.
I was still trying to adjust to the idea that I’d been arrested because of things I’d done in self-defense or without truly understanding the possible consequences of my actions. It didn’t seem right.
Annalist nodded. “Very well.” He returned his attention to me. “Do you know what you are?”
“Um. Sarah? A cuckoo? Biologically speaking, a giant telepathic wasp that’s decided to masquerade as a mammal for reasons I presume are connected to the evolutionary pressures of Johrlar?
Increasingly annoyed with this whole situation?
” I was channeling my cousin Annie a bit by the end, my frustration beginning to overwhelm my customary calm.
“That is a sufficient starting place,” said Annalist. “We are the Johrlac, however much we may seek to divide ourselves internally. We were born to the lush green places of this world, and we grew there, peaceful, for a time. In the beginning, all were of one hive, until our cousins, the Apraxis, realized they had no need to find or gather their own histories: they could plant their larvae in the bodies of our workers and wait. When the larvae matured, the Apraxis would know all that the worker had known, and would be enriched, while we were lessened.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are you saying Apraxis wasps come from Johrlar too?”
“Yes,” said Annalist, with a flicker of annoyance at the interruption. “You know of them?”
“They’re a problem on Earth. We kill them when we find them, but it only takes one to start a new hive, and they don’t have any natural predators.”
“Ah,” said Annalist. “I suppose that is to be expected.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Apraxis stalked and preyed upon us, year on year, until we could no longer tolerate the pressure. Our hives began to change in response to the danger. Our advantage over the Apraxis was our unity, which could protect even the farthest-ranging scouts. Unity was born from the strength of our minds, which grew beyond theirs, and so we bred for smarter children, greater unity, larger minds. Our forms began to change.”
I nodded slowly. Evolution in response to predatory pressures wasn’t unheard-of, even on Earth.
I still didn’t understand how we’d ended up looking so damn mammalian, but there might not be an explanation for that, depending on when in our history it had happened; sometimes evolution just does what seems funny at the time, and the survivors get to cope with the consequences.
“We grew larger. Our wings were lost, and we became as the crawling creatures of the forest, but it mattered not, for we found that the eldest among us could move things with a thought. Those that had completed the process of maturation were able to reorder the world from inside the hives, and it became clear that power should be seated in their mandibles. We began to take shelter in the colony homes of the wood-chewing ants which dwell below the loam. Their colony minds were large and slow and decentralized, and they were willing to tolerate us for our contributions. We grew fleshy as our exoskeletons sank below the surface of our bodies, increasing our flexibility and our ability to be of use to our hosts.”
“So … we started as wasps, and then became naked ant mimics so we could practice being better telepaths?”
Annalist nodded. “The first true collective formed below the ground, as we were given time to bring more and more of our number through the full cycle of instars to maturity. The first great queens compiled the unwritten equation, and on a single night of brilliance and beauty we rose from the earth and opened a rift between worlds, pushing the hated Apraxis into the void. Upon rising, we found we could no longer bear the confinement of the soil, and we returned to our trees, building nests and forming hives, still cradled within the collective.”
“Ah.” So this was a creation myth draped in the trappings of history: what he was describing would have taken centuries at the absolute least, generation after generation of proto-Johrlac dying in the dark underground as they fought to force their own evolution.
It wouldn’t have happened in a single generation just because they had sufficient queens.
But that was the flaw in what seemed to be a purely oral tradition of information-keeping: not enough space for all the details.
No one knew better than I did how limited the space really was inside a mind.
Even if you went ahead and deleted all the unnecessary memories and personality traits of the person providing the storage, you’d run out of room before you could encompass an entire history.
So why not simplify, leave out the bits that didn’t change anything, and ignore the fact that simplification will always omit something that someone believes mattered, once upon a time?
I didn’t say any of that, only thought of collapsing functions and mathematical shortcuts and nodded, pushing understanding toward Annalist.
“The first collective endured long enough to begin the building of our civilization,” said Annalist. “We found other hives of Apraxis; we exiled them as we had the first, cleansing them colony after colony from the world as we wished it should be. We found other groups of Johrlac, and we absorbed them, as we were further along in our collective than they were. One of them, dominating the continent to the east, had almost as large and advanced a collective as our own. They fought back, but our collective was the stronger, and they were absorbed. We did not, at the time, understand what it would mean to allow a second collective to fester within the first, and so we did not break it down as we should have.”
“What is a ‘collective’?” I asked. I was already fairly sure I knew, but I wanted to be certain, and I wanted him to say it.
“A collective is the unity formed by the joining of mature minds that guides a community’s progress and progression,” he said, with no trace of distress. “A collective encompasses all its parts, and guides them as necessary.”
“A hive mind. You’re describing a hive mind. But you’re all individuals. You seem to have personalities beyond what the hive would assign to you. How is that possible?”
“Individual workers are partitioned to preserve a measure of autonomy, since without it, we become less efficient,” said Annalist. “The queens cannot conduct the sweeping of every floor and the collection of every scrap of information. It would be too much. It must be decentralized in order to remain efficient. If the collective wishes, it can shut down that autonomy and reclaim it at once. That is why we must work swiftly and in secret, because if the collective realizes we plot against its wholeness, it will remove our ability to act. We will become of the one, and will no longer desire as we currently desire.”
“All right, let me see if I’m following this correctly: the collective is a hive mind, and you all belong to the hive mind, but it lets you have your own lives so that it doesn’t have to do all the work.
Only if it figures out that you’re using those lives to do things it won’t like, it might smash you flat? ”
“In the most primitive of terms, yes. The collective could know everything we know, if it only cared to look into us and learn. We must remain beyond suspicion.”
“You said you let a second collective fester. What does that mean?”