Raen needed more than that. This tall, gaunt Kontrin had come, and talked with her, and she had been distressed: the strange born-man azi had distressed her further. He under-stood that there were connections he could not comprehend, that perhaps she was somewhere with him, who was of her kind—and that in hazardous things an azi of his training was useless.

Keep the house in order.

It was far from what she needed, but it was the limit of his function. He had seen betas, who could make up what to do: Kontrin, whose function he could not conceive, but who simply knew. He had seen the pens and knew himself.

Dimly he realised that if Raen were lost, he would be terminated: someone had told him that they did not pass on their azi; but he failed to take alarm at that. He thought should that happen, he would simply sit down and wait for termination, out of interest in other things, without further use. There was an unfamiliar tightness in his throat that had bided there most of the day, a tenseness that would not go away.

Be calm, old tapes echoed in his mind. Calm is always good. When you cannot be calm, you are useless. A useless azi is nothing. Turn of all disturbance. Instruction will come. You are blameless if you are calm and waiting for instruction.

Next came the punishment, if he let the emotion well up, the inbuilt nausea. He was shaking, torn between the tightness in his throat and the sickness which heaved at his stomach, and knew that if he let the one go, the other would follow. He had no time for this. He fought down the hysteria with a simple exercise of self-distraction, refusing to think in the direction of his feelings. Calm, calm, calm is good. Good is happy. Happy is useful. Good azi are always useful.

He busied himself at once, taking the deepstudy unit out of the closet, opening the case with the tapes. Calm, calm, calm,he insisted to himself, for his hand shook as he deliberately chose the tapes with the black cases, the forbidden ones. The disobedience increased the pain in his stomach. For her, he kept telling himself; and, Good azi are always useful, playing one tape against the other. If he had what was in her tapes he would know what she knew; if he knew what she knew, he would understand what to do.

He propped up a divider from the case, contrived a way to brace the stack which he made in the play-slot, for they were far more than the machine was designed to hold. Focus the mind, concentrate only on the physical action: that was the means to keep calm in crisis. Never mind where the action was tending; it was only necessary to do, until all was done.

He prepared the machine. He prepared the chair, throwing over it a blanket for padding; last of all he prepared himself, stripped completely, smoothed the blanket so that there would be not the least wrinkle to crease his skin during the long collapse, and found the pill bottle where he had left it last, in the bath. He sat down then, with the pill clenched in his teeth, attached the leads. Last of all he drew the edges of the blanket over himself and swallowed the pill, waiting for the numbness to begin.

I shall change, he thought, and panic rose in him, for he had always liked the individual he was, and this was self-murder.

He felt the haziness begin, bade himself goodbye, and threw the switch—composed his arms loosely to his sides and leaned back, waiting.

The machine cycled in.

He was not unconscious; he was hyperconscious, but not of things around him—gripped and shaken by the alienness that poured in.

Attitudes. Information. Contradictions. The minds of immortals, the creators of the Reach. He absorbed until body began to scream out distantly to mind that there was hazard, and went on absorbing.

He could not want to stop, save in the small pauses where instruction ceased. Then he would try to scream for help. But he was not truly conscious, and body would not respond at all. The stream began again, and volition ceased.

ii

“Meth-maren,” Mother intoned, distraught. “Find, find this queen.” Workers soothed Her; Drones sang their dismay. There was/had been impression of separation, the hive-consciousness that had been established for a time stretched thin, soaring as in flight.

Then disaster.

Workers laboured, frantically. The hive reached out and sought Meth-maren hive, one with it. Workers died in the stress, jaws worn away, bodies exhausted, and the husks were caught up and carried away as the work boiled forward. Azi fell beneath their burdens and drank and rested and staggered back to their work, to die there.

There was in the hive the frightened taste of a green scout, who had fallen to Warriors. Disorientation was in its hive also, the memory of Meth-marens of ages past, before the sun had risen at such an angle and the world had changed colours.

And it in turn had tasted the minds of golds, who tasted of reds, whose fierceness now had a taint of hesitancy, less push and more of fear.

“Kill,” the Warrior portion of blue-Mind urged. “Restore health. Kill the unhealthy.”

Drones sang of memory, and the balance of the hive shifted toward Warrior-thoughts and shifted back again to Mother, as She wrenched it to Herself, fierceness greater than theirs, for it embraced eggs, survival.

BUILD, the command went out, and the Workers hastened in frenzy.

iii

They huddled, an exhausted group, in the shade of a hedge. Raen slipped fingers under her visor and wiped sweat from her eyes, withdrew them, adjusted the rim to a new place and grimaced it back to the old. The hood of her sunsuit was back, the gloves off, the sleeves unfastened to the elbow; toward evening as it was, still the heat lingered as the residue of a furnace. The suits that saved from burn, ventilated as they were by majat-silk insets, left the skin sticky with perspiration, clung with every movement. A dead azi’s rifle was on her knees, weight on sore muscles; she had food and a canteen from the emergency stores and would not drink, tormenting herself with the thought of it—supplies meant for ten, and a cluster of thirsty men about her: neither did others drink, being azi, and waiting. The wounded bore their wounds, and the insects, without a sound: it was only surprise could get an outcry from them, and there was none of that. They knew what the situation was. They were the lighter by two they had started with, the worst-wounded; the bearers had been glad, and she did not delude herself otherwise. In that day she had reconsidered her mercy, and gazed at two others as had, and at the grasslands endless about them, and she had almost turned the gun on them. Instead she had given them a sip of water, that compounded the idiocy, and the same to the bearers: for herself and the others there was only the chance to moisten mouths and spit it back, and no one defied instructions.

She was, however long ago, of Cerdin, and Cerdin’s sun was no kinder; she was, for the rest, accustomed to exercise, and most of these were not. She had Merry by her, poor Merry, his lips as cracked as hers felt, his face bruised as well as scraped; she trusted him more than the others, these babes new from the pens. Merry helped, used his wits; the others obeyed.

There was a stirring, a shrilling; they snatched rifles up nervously, but it was one Warrior, their own, that bore a white rag tied on a forelimb so that the azi could tell it. It ran low, scuttled up waving its palps and seeking scent.

“Here,” Raen said, turning her hand to it. It came, offered taste, the sweet fluids of its own body, and it was welcome. She touched the scent-patches, soothed it, for it had been moving hard, and air pulsed from the chambers so it had difficulty with human speech.