The Forlorn(15)

It was different, vastly different, in the layer of hive where the warrior brood were kept. Here there was always a susurration of low-pitched cage-to-cage talk. The human mind needs stimulus of some kind. Without stimulus it atrophies. But speech, even only speech, can be enough to keep sanity and, if the selection pressures favor intelligence, can produce far more . . .

The oral tradition had generated a strange and distorted picture of the outside world, passed down from the first captives, but the women had a very real idea of the function and structure of the hive. They had time, endless time, to talk, to theorize, to plot and to scheme, until they became reproductively dysfunctional and were taken away to the rendering rooms. The only other distraction in the tiny cells was one's own body, and the products thereof. The Morkth were unaware that in the eternal semidarkness of their warrior breeders' bare cells they had been fomenting a rebellion for generations now.

This ultimate form of hell had not produced dehumanization, as it had in worker brood sows. Instead it produced a terrible richness, a flowering of poetry, philosophy and mathematics, all directed toward one end: the ultimate destruction of the Morkth. Now they'd found their tool—S'kith 235. And it was even more pleasant than masturbation. It provided a basic human need they'd all been long denied: simple physical contact with another person. For some seven years now the Alpha-Morkth warrior breeding program had been quietly sabotaged. At least eleven thousand new Morkth-men were growing up through the indoctrination classes. Passing unnoticed, yet with a terrifying gene cocktail of high intelligence, intense curiosity and instinctive secretive cunning, virtually from their first reasoning thought. This latter feature was S'kith 235's unique mutation, but he bred true, in more than eighty percent of cases. His male offspring were passing undetected up the layers of the Alpha-Morkth warrior training. All around them other lines were culled. But S'kith 235's children were tailored to survive and flourish in the hive.

It was certain that a reasonable percentage would, like S'kith 235, find a way around the just-post-puberty castration rite of passage, when the Alpha-Morkth collected and selected the semen that was frozen and used for future breeding. And if they had testicles . . . sooner or later they'd find their way down to the breeding cages. His female offspring were already being selected as potential warrior sows. The vertebrate cockroach was adapting yet again. It would beat this system too, before inbreeding weakened the strain.

In the dark, the statisticians calculated again. There was no need. They knew the answer. They simply did it for the sheer satisfaction. The point of break-even probability had long since been reached. They knew that with each S'kith-fathered conception the time of Morkth destruction came closer. They also knew that with each conception the chances of S'kith's capture grew greater. S'kith 235 knew nothing of love. He had little understanding of what the brew of emotions and hormones were that drove him down into this dangerous place, again and again and again. But among the warrior-brood women he was dearly loved. And they were already preparing to mourn him.

It was the twenty percent of his offspring that were culled that were reaching to enmesh S'kith 235. He had manipulated the gene records after the women had pointed out that this would certainly trap him if he did not. After his changes the gene records of his offspring were not what they were supposed to be. Resultantly, when the cull-tissue sample was analyzed, the two did not match. An improbably high number showed a particular chromosome group. A group not in the sperm-bank records. A mutant. A mutation that bred without Morkth supervision. Slowly, slowly, the methodical net of the Morkth was closing in on the Alpha-Morkth guard on the roof of the hive.

There were two possible ways that S'kith 235 could evade certain capture and death at the hands of his masters. A Beta-Morkth raid, or flight. The probability of the former was about 0.2 percent. The Beta-Morkth would simply kill him, it was true; they despised the Alpha's use of humanity. The human race was something to be destroyed utterly, and not consorted with. The probability of S'kith 235 fleeing was even slimmer: The hive was his universe, a conditioning going to the core of his being from his earliest thought. The Alpha-Morkth had attempted to breed the kind of loyalty which was instinctive to them, and constantly reinforced by the pheromones unique to each queen's gene line. At the same time they had done their best to remove all normal human emotional cues: love, family and sex.

They had failed to make S'kith loyal to anything but himself. In humans loyalty is a two-way street, and the hive gave none of the emotional return humans require above such physical things as nutrition. But they had managed to make him terrified of the non-hive world.