For the mole rats, everything works fine until the queen shows signs of falling from her throne. The sterile workers suddenly start to develop sexual characteristics, and there is a bloody succession battle — and the prize for the victor is nothing less than the chance to pass on her genes.
“And that’s why the old fogies are pushed out to the perimeter of the colony,” Peter said coldly. “They are the ones in the front line when a jackal digs up a tunnel — but they are dispensable. You want your young at the center, where they can be quickly deployed to replace the reproductive. But the old ones sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group readily enough. That’s another eusocial trait — suicide to protect others.
“You see what I’m saying. The mole rats are eusocial,” he said. “There is absolutely no doubt about that. As eusocial as any ant or termite or bee — but they are mammals.”
He talked on about mole rats, and other mammals with traces of eusociality — hunting dogs in the desert, for instance. One detail startled me. In the mole rat warrens, the rodents would swarm and huddle to control the flow of air through their passageways. It was just like the Crypt, though I hadn’t told him about Rosa’s antique ventilation system.
By now I knew exactly where he was going. I felt cold.
“Mammals but not human,” I said heavily. “And humans make choices about how they live their lives, Peter. Rational and moral choices. We’re in control of ourselves, in a way no animal can be.”
“ Are we? How about that traffic jam?”
“Peter — get to the point. Forget the mole rats. Talk about the Order.”
He nodded. “Then we have to talk about Regina, your great-great-greatest-grandmother. Because it all started with her.”
In those first few turbulent decades, for the band of women huddling in their pit under the Appian Way, it had been just as it was for a band of naked mole rats out on the savanna — or so Peter’s analysis went.
With imperial Rome crumbling around them, it became a lot safer for daughters to stay home with their mothers, to extend the Crypt rather than to migrate.
“So you have just the same kind of resource and population pressures as in a mole rat colony.”
I frowned. “But Regina would never have made a choice about eusociality. In the fifth century she couldn’t even have formulated it.”
“But she had the right instinct. It’s all there, in her own words. Remember those three slogans, carved on the walls?”
“Sisters matter more than daughters. Ignorance is strength. Listen to your sisters.”
“Yes.” He called up another file on his handheld. “… Here we are.”
It was an extract from Regina’s biography. I read: “Regina asked her followers to consider the blood of Brica, her daughter, and that of Agrippina, her granddaughter. Agrippina’s blood is half the blood of Brica, half of her father, and so a quarter mine, said Regina. But if Agrippina were to have a baby her blood would mix with the father’s, and so the baby would be only an eighth mine. Suppose I have to choose between a baby of Agrippina’s, or another baby of Brica’s. I can only choose one, for there is no room for both. Which should I choose? And they said, You would choose for Brica to have another child. For sisters matter more than daughters …”
Peter looked at me. “ Sisters matter more than daughters. Regina thought in terms of keeping her blood from being diluted. It doesn’t matter that the mechanics actually works with genes — her instinct was right. And once that is established, much else follows. The breeding rights of a few mothers, your mamme-nonne, are favored over everybody else’s rights, even over their own children’s. The drones’ only chance of passing on their own genes is to help their mothers, and their sisters …”
It was the first time he had used the word drones.
“Slogan two: Ignorance is strength. Regina understood systems. And she wanted the Order’s system, the whole, to dominate over the parts. She didn’t want some charismatic fool taking over and ruining everything in the pursuit of some foolish dream. So she ordered that everybody should know as little as possible, and should follow the people close to them. The Order drones are agents who work locally, with only local knowledge, and no insight into the bigger picture.
“Three: Listen to your sisters. That slogan encourages feedback. Inside the Crypt there’s a relentless pressure to conform. You told me you felt it, when you were in the Crypt, the endless social weight. Poor Lucia, who wouldn’t conform, suffered exclusion. The social pressure is a homeostasis — like the temperature regulator of an air-conditioning system, a negative feedback that keeps everybody in their place.”
“It was all just looks,” I said uncomfortably. “Nothing was said.”
He fixed nonexistent glasses, intense, determined, anxious. “You think when you were in the Crypt people communicated with you just with speech?” Again he tapped at his handheld, seeking the right reference. “George, we have many channels of communication. Look at this.” He pushed the handheld at me; its tiny screen showed a dense technical paper. “We have a paralanguage — vocal stuff but nonverbal, groans and laughs and sighs, and body posture, touch, motion — going on in parallel to everything we say. The anthropologists have identified hundreds of these signals — more than the chimps, more than the monkeys. Even without speech, we would have a richer way to communicate even than the chimps, and they manage to run pretty complex societies. And all this is going on under the surface of our spoken interaction.” He was staring at me now. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you didn’t feel a pressure from the way people in there behaved toward you, regardless of what they actually said.”
I imagined those circles of pale, disapproving faces. I shook my head to dispel the vision.
Peter said, “And then there are other ways to communicate. Touch, even scent … The smells, all that kissing you describe. Tasting each other, you said.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? George, weaver ants communicate with pheromones. And chemical communication is a very old system. Single-celled creatures have to rely on simple chemical messages to tell them about their environment, because only multicelled creatures — like ants, like humans — are complex enough to organize clusters of cells into eyes and ears … I admit I’m speculating about this.
“But, George, put it all together and you’ve got a classic recipe for an emergent system: local decision making by ignorant agents responding to local stimuli, and powerful feedback mechanisms. And then you have a genetic mandate for eusociality. All in those three slogans.”
“All right. And then what happened? How did we get from there to here — from Regina to Lucia?”
He sighed and massaged his temples. “Look, George, if you haven’t believed me up to now, you won’t believe what comes next. In the wild — among the ants or the mole rats — once you get a reproductive advantage like that, of mothers over daughters, no matter how slight, you get a positive feedback.
“People started to change. To adapt. If the daughters aren’t going to get a chance to reproduce, it’s better for their bodies to stay subadult. Why waste all those resources on a pointless puberty? Of course you retain the potential to become mature, in case a queen drops dead, and you have the chance to replace her. Meanwhile, it pays for the mothers to pump out the kids as long and as often as possible …”
I felt a deep, sickening dread as his logic drew me in, step by step. “So in the Crypt they have kids every three months. And they stay fertile for decades past any outsider’s menopause age.”