Jim had simply shut his eyes in panic. Raen reached him, caught his arm, shocked him out of it. “Touch,” she told him. “You must touch it.” And when he did not move with propriety, reaching instead to the thorax, Raen took his right hand in hers, guided it between the jaws to Warrior’s offered scent-patches. The huge Warrior, only minimally sane, bent lower, jaws wide, touched false chelae to Jim’s lips, taking taste as well as scent. Jim’s face broke out in sweat: this too warrior tasted, sweeping it from his brow with the delicate bristles of the false chelae.

“Trust it,” Raen whispered into his ear, yet gripping his arm. “Stand still, stand still; blues will never harm you once this Warrior has reported on Istra. It can’t recognise faces, but it knows the taste now. Maybe it can even distinguish you from your duplicates; I’d imagine it can.”

She let go. Warrior had perceptibly calmed. It touched at Jim, touched her.

“Blue-hive,” it murmured, deep baritone. And then with a distressed waving of its palps: “Danger.”

“There is danger everywhere for blues.” Raen offered her right hand to its mandibles, willful hazard, comforting gesture. “Hive-friend. Do you also bear taste of reds? Of Kethiuy? Of killing?”

Mandibles clashed as her hand withdrew; jaws smoked, strongly enough to decapitate human or majat. “Killing,” it moaned from its chambers, deep harmony. “Red-hive, killings, yess.”

“I was there, on Cerdin, when reds killed blues. Does Kalind blue remember that? Messengers went out from Cerdin then. Surely some got through. Some must have lived.”

“Not-clear. Drone-function.”

“But you know Cerdin.”

“Cerdin.” It sucked air and expelled it softly. “Yess. Cerdin. First-hive. This-unit does not make full understanding. This-unit will report. Blue queen of Istra will interpret. Queen will understand.”

“Surely she will.”

“This-unit will not see Kalind again. This-unit is cut off. I can carry this message no farther than the Istran queen. Then I must unMind.”

“Perhaps the Istran queen will take you instead, Warrior, and change that instruction.”

“This-unit hopes.”

“This-unit also hopes, Warrior.”

Palps caressed her face with great tenderness. Truly neuter, Warrior had no concept of any function but duty; yet majat units could feel some sentiment on their own, and Warriors were—very slightly—egocentric.

She laid her hand on its forelimb. “What brings you here? What message, Warrior? Answer me.”

The great armoured head rotated in that gesture that had so many nuances to majat vision. “This-unit does not know; I taste of revenge, Kethiuy-queen.”

It was complex, then, locked within its body-chemistry; it gave her Warrior-reading only, and the Warrior-mind conceived it as revenge. A chill ran over her skin, an echo of things past.

“I have known you before, Warrior.”

“Warrior memory,” it confirmed, and touched at her, touched at them both. “Meth-maren. Yesss. Not all Kontrin are friends. Trust you. Trust you, Kethiuy-queen.”

A message had gotten through, eighteen, nineteen years ago. Warrior was with her. She touched it, her hand trembling.

“We will be docking soon, Warrior. You must secure yourself for your own protection, and not trouble these beta humans. They are no harm, no harm to you.”

“Yes,” it agreed. It reared up and looked about, head rotating half this way and half that. “Lost,” it complained. “Human-hive. Lost.”

“Come,” she bade it, and brought it to a security panel, took its right chela and touched it to the emergency grip. It clenched it, secure then as a human safely belted. “You must stay here, Warrior. Let your skin dry. You’ve come high enough. Hold and wait, and harm no human who doesn’t threaten you. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”

“Lost. This-unit must find Istra blue.”

She stroked the sensitive side-pales, reckoning what a complex and fearful task Warrior faced, with no sun overhead, encased in one cold metal structure after another on its way. Majat did not easily comprehend that it was not all one sun and all one world. It had entrusted itself to betas for hire, hoping it was given right directions, set on the right ship; and blue messengers faced other obstacles, for Kontrin discouraged their travelling, and accidents befell one after the other. “I will guide you,” she told it. “Stay. Wait for me.”

“Blue-hive,” it breathed, bowed under the pleasurable caress. Jaws clashed. “I wait. Yesss.”

“My-chamber is twelfth door beyond the turning-left, as you face.”

“This-unit guards.”

“Yes,” she agreed, touched the pulps and drew back. The halls were cold; its processes were slow: it was all too willing now to sink down and rest. She thought of bidding it instead to her own suite, but there was Jim, who stood against the wall in a seeming state of shock. She soothed it a last time with her hand, turned away and took Jim with her, trusting it would be safe; indeed, no one would likely venture that ball, and if someone would have harmed it, of those aboard, that would have been done while it slept, helpless—not now.

This messenger would get through.

Is this the best action?the Mother of Cerdin had asked. Among majat there were no children, only eggs, and adults. Mother had asked a human for advice, and a child had answered: Mother had not known.

It was wise that humans had been forbidden the hive, direct access to queens, to Drones, to the Mind. She abhorred now what she was doing, imprinting Warrior, while it was unadvised by any queen.

That imprint would enter Istran blues, as truth, as true as Warrior’s legitimate message.

It was her key to the hives.

iv

Jim exited the bath, whiter than he had been. He had lost the breakfast, and decided on another prolonged bath. Now, wrapped in a bathsheet, he flung himself belly-down on the wide bed and showed no disposition to move.

Raen bent over him, touched his damp shoulders. “You’re sure you’re all right? You didn’t let it scratch you, did you?”

“All right,” he echoed indistinctly. She decided that he was, and that the kindest thing she could do at the moment was to let him lie. He was shill overheated from the water. She pulled a corner of the bedclothes loose and flung over him, shrugged and walked back to her own business.

She packed, settling everything with precision into bar several cases—scuffed and battered from much use, that luggage—but it contained so well the things she would not give up, from world to world. Most that she had bought on the ship she thought of leaving; and then she decided otherwise and simply jammed things in the more tightly: Istra did not promise their equal.

To all of it she added the fifth and sixth cases, the deep. study apparatus and her precious tapes; she never trusted a strange apparatus, and the tapes—the tapes she kept much beyond their usefulness for casual knowledge, some for pleasure, some for sentiment, a few for reference. And there were half a dozen that Council would be aghast to know existed in duplicate; but Hal Ilit had admitted her within his security, and never seen beyond his own self-indulgence, his own vanity, not even in dying. She counted the tapes through, making sure everything was in its slot, nothing lost, nothing left to assumption.

And she would have taken the refuge deepstudy offered for an hour now, having finished all else: it was the best antidote for unpleasantness. But Jim was there, and she did not mean to make the hit’s mistake: under deepstudy, one was utterly helpless, and she would not, would never accept sinking into that state in another’s presence, even an azi’s. She paced the suite in boredom, and finally, sure beyond doubt that there remained nothing to do, she sat down and keyed in the viewer, one of the entertainment channels.