Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "At least I don't have weeds to deal with," Zhen Chi said, when she saw Jamie. She was kneeling in one of the flower beds, doing something or other to the plants. Jamie wasn't remotely experienced enough to say what. "We didn't bring them along, so we don't have to pull them up. I could certainly do with bees, though."

  "Aren't the Vixa close enough?" asked Jamie. "I thought they were supposed to be hive animals."

  Zhen Chi stood up, peeled off her very petite gardening gloves, and carefully shook the dirt off them. "Come sit," she said, indicating a bench off to one side of the flower bed. Jamie followed her over and sat next to her and stared fixedly at the flowers.

  "Nice to see some life-forms I'm sort of familiar with," he said. "Even if I don't know much about them."

  "Let me guess," she said. "You had a pretty rough ritual of submission."

  "I don't remember submitting to anything."

  "Yeah, but they call it that. What happened?"

  "We went in to see a Grand Vixan named Zeeraum. While we were standing there, she opened the, whatever you call it, her mouth sphincter." Jamie gestured toward the top of his own head to show where he meant. "There were some bones and things there. Some cute little helper Vixa scuttled up there to clean out the debris. Once it was done, Zeeraum picked up one of the helpers, cuddled it for a second, then tossed it into her mouth and swallowed it whole. We could hear it screaming from inside the mouth--and even saw it struggling."

  "If it's any help, which it probably isn't, I very much doubt that's what you saw. When Zeeraum was finished cuddling the helper, she would have paralyzed it by using one of her manipulator-arm stings. The Vixan digestive acids and enzymes are very powerful and fast-acting. The flesh dissolves fast and produces a lot of gas, which can form bubbles and odd noises as it dissipates."

  "I saw what I saw, and heard what I heard," said Jamie.

  "Then, by the lights of her own culture, Zeeraum was guilty of deviant behavior. Forgive me for putting it in such flippant terms, but the Vixa view it as very poor form to play with their food. If she's caught doing that, she'll be punished."

  "Oh, good. Now I feel much better about Zeeraum's swallowing her relative whole."

  "I know these aren't the points you're worried about," said Zhen Chi, "but Vixa don't swallow. That mouth is really just the opening to a sort of predigestion chamber. The food goes in, and the digestive juices start flowing, and everything edible is dissolved off the food object. The liquefied food flows down into the main body for further digestion, leaving the solid remains behind to be spat out or cleaned up or whatever. The predigestion chamber is normally kept full and working at all times."

  "And all that makes cannibalism all right?"

  "No. But, by their lights--and as a piece of brutal logic--what you saw wasn't cannibalism, or any more or less wrong than your eating a hamburger. The only difference is the cow is killed and slaughtered and chopped into little pieces for you, off where no one has to see it."

  "After yesterday, I'd have to say that's a pretty big difference," said Jamie. "But one Vixa ate another. How is that not cannibalism?"

  "We don't even know how many Vixa biological castes there are," she answered. "We're reasonably certain that the smaller ones are maybe as smart as say, dogs or rats. Not smart enough to talk, or think--but smart enough to be programmed to perform simple tasks. Some of them don't have minds at all, in any sense we'd understand. They just have what amount to remote-control systems."

  "And they didn't get those from Mother Nature," Jamie said. "It had to be that our escort Vixa were being operated by some sort of centralized system. Were they all lobotomized and equipped with two-way radios?"

  "Possibly, but unlikely. They can function independently, so their brains haven't been altogether removed."

  "Yeah, I saw behavior to confirm that. But my point is that not all of these castes and variants and so on evolved naturally. They've been bred, or genetically engineered. I take your point that there's not really any logical distinction between me eating a cow in pieces and a Vixan eating another critter in one bite--but taking my cousin, or my child, and genetically engineering him so his ancestors are not only mindless, but delicious--maybe even breeding them so they don't mind being eaten--that's different. That's wrong."

  "Yes," said Zhen Chi. "It is wrong, horribly wrong and evil--for us. It's decadent, degenerate--for us. I certainly don't approve of their culture. I find it as repellent as you do. But we come from a species where we really are all the same--and a species that just recently stopped treating people who looked slightly different from them like animals. It's still a wound, a raw wound, with us. And seeing a species where all the lies told about human slaves are true--the lower-end castes are happy, they aren't capable of taking care of themselves, they love taking care of us, we are better than they, and we were born to rule them--just saying those words makes me feel a little bit sick. And yet, here, they are all true." She shuddered. "Brrr. It makes us all twitchy. But I'll tell you what might be the deeper truth--the thing that makes us wonder if the Vixa really are decadent, maybe even degenerate, as a culture. It's the waste."

  "The waste of what? And what does it matter what they waste? They're infinitely richer than us."

  "The waste of their own potential, if you come right down to it. There were some xenoanthropologists through here a while ago, doing some very basic observations on the Vixa. They estimated that the majority--that's more than fifty percent--of their economic activity revolves around demonstrating and establishing status. The specially bred escorts. The huge, uselessly redundant space elevators. The whole Stationary Ring. The massive cities that have to be built to hold all the escorts and aides and assistants and what have you, billions of them, to dance attendance on, at most, a few million Grand Vixa and other fully sentient castes. Think what they could accomplish with the energy and skills and resources that are burned up by status display."

  "Could they do that?" Jamie asked. "Could they break free? Would they want to, or need to?"

  "You mean, so they could start acting sensible, like us?" Zhen Chi smiled sadly, and shook her head. "I doubt it," she said. "I know you've heard it a million times, but biology is destiny. I don't care how Elder the Race is--every species is shaped by the way it evolved, what its nonsentient ancestors did for a living. There is no strong link between the complexity of the physical, biological organism and the sophistication or level of advancement of the culture. There are some sentient species that are way beyond humans in terms of bio-complexity and sophistication--but insofar as their culture--to use the technical term, they're a bunch of slobs. What they've got, those races inherited from other races. On their own, they really don't have that much to offer.

  "The Vixa are somewhere between highly evolved trilobites and the first chordates, with much larger brains, of course. We're much more biologically complex--but simple designs can be very advanced and efficient. And there is nothing second-class at all about their minds. Take a look at their technology and you can see that.

  "The Vixa have made simplicity work for them in lots of ways, made it into a huge advantage. It's easier to make changes to a simpler machine. That right there explains a lot of their ability to modify themselves into so many variants with so little apparent effort. Their stingers and toxins, for example. There's a stinger at the end of each arm, and the Vixa have engineered themselves so that each stinger injects a different toxin. Their med-specialist castes don't have toxins in their stingers--they've got various injectable medicines.

  "But it's not even about evolution or biological complexity. It's about how they reproduce. Think ants, think termites, think naked mole rats. Have you ever read Brave New World? Aldous Huxley? Early twentieth century--pre just about everything. Precloning. Pre-behavioral science. Pre discovery of DNA, for that matter. All the science, all the technology wrong--but the basic idea of a society that mass-produces people--that part Huxley got right. If I were the ambassador, I don't know if
I'd make that book required reading for everyone at the embassy--or else ban it from the embassy library as too disturbing and a threat to morale."

  "You've gotten ahead of me," Jamie said.

  "Okay. Sorry. I do that. I get involved, and I just take off with it, whatever it is. Okay. Lemme back up. Hive species. Like ants and termites and bees. One thing they have in common is that they limit reproduction. The queen bee is the only one who lays eggs. All the bees in the hive are her children. Nearly all of them are sterile females. Worker bees. Naked mole rats are mammals, but they have a lot of behaviors in common with ants and termites. They have a queen that does all the reproducing. They build an underground burrow and pretty much never leave it. They create, control--and are confined by, controlled by, the limits of the burrow."

  "That's not like the Vixa," Jamie protested.

  "It isn't?" Zhen Chi gestured at the blue sky above, the garden by the embassy, the world all around. The breeze blew a few strands of hair into her eyes and she brushed them away. "Aside from cops and security types, have you seen one Vixa outside, not in a vehicle or a structure, but outside, exposed to the sky and the wind and the air, since you got here?"

  "Well, now that you mention it, no. But I've seen diplomats, trade representatives, even Vixan police investigators on human worlds. I've talked to them. They went outside. Sometimes." Thinking back on it, Jamie realized the Vixa he had met did seem to find a lot of reasons to stay inside.

  "If they were outside, I promise they didn't enjoy it," said Zhen Chi. "There are worker castes and soldier-police castes and so on modified to tolerate exposure to the outside, but that's considered very low-class behavior. And I promise you, as certain as I'm sitting here with you, that those diplomats and representatives and investigators were specially bred--no, more than that, specially engineered from prebred stock, then specially raised and indoctrinated for the job they were doing. And, my guess would be, they were heavily medicated at all times. Remember what I said about the medical castes having injectable meds in their stingers? Some of our more excessively imaginative intell types think that the Vixa bred and engineered for off-planet work have their stinger glands modified to provide various tranquilizers for self-injection!

  "Believe me, one of the things that the Vixa sneer at us for is that we like to go outside--and they think the concept of privacy is a downright deviation. And I can bet you whatever you like that you never saw a Vixa alone--"

  "SubPilot Greveltra! The one who flew us here!"

  "I was about to say, except for a spacecraft pilot or subpilot. They're crazy already so it doesn't matter. And I think they're crazy because they are bred and engineered to be alone. Every other caste or breed of Vixa actively needs company. At least one companion, preferably dozens. That's probably where a lot of the escort tradition came from. Aside from the pilot castes, my rough measure is that an hour or so alone for a Vixa is like a month in solitary confinement for us."

  "What about the simulants?" Jamie asked. "My sim was alone with us for a while."

  "They need to do that for imprinting, I think. There's a lot of guesswork. The simulants are new to us, and we know almost nothing about them. But I'd bet a week's pay that as soon as your simulant had the chance, it linked up with a Vixa or another simulant--and, if it had the chance, it stayed away from the SubPilot."

  "Well, yeah. You're right."

  "My guess--and it's just a guess--is that they regard space travel as such a high-risk profession that they design the whole system to expose as few Vixa as possible to it. Not for the sake of the individual's safety. That wouldn't matter so much. But to limit contamination. Exposure. To keep from having to contemplate sending ten or twenty Vixa, or a whole subhive, some socially significant grouping, outside the group. It's a very disturbing idea to them. Risking one SubPilot would be like risking a fingernail. Not a much bigger deal than expending a simulant. But ten or twenty six-limbers, or even nine-limbers--a group of connected, related, individuals is something very different. That is perceived as a significant part of the whole."

  "But if there's a hive mentality, why should the hive care about individuals?"

  "They--it, the hive--doesn't care about individuals. It's fear. Like giving someone a chance to chop off your hand, or poke your eye out. Plus, maybe, that chopped-off hand could grow itself a new body--and then come looking for you."

  "Huh?"

  "In theory, at least, a large enough group could be the nucleus, the starting point for a new hive that would compete with the old one. So the old hive not only doesn't want a large number of its members to die--it also doesn't want them cut off, given a chance to escape and grow on their own."

  "But how could they form a new hive if they're all sterile?"

  "In honey bees, if the queen lays an unfertilized egg, that egg still grows into a bee--a male, a drone. That drone could then mate with the queen and fertilize her eggs, so they would grow into worker bees. Feed one of those workers royal jelly long enough, and it will grow into a queen who might be able to start her own hive--but she'd be the descendent of a drone hatched from an unfertilized egg. We don't know the details of Vixan biology very well at all, and I'm sure it doesn't work quite that way--but if bees can reproduce without a queen, why not Vixa? Besides, bees don't have labs and test tubes and gene sequencers and cloning labs--but Vixa do. And maybe they aren't so good at doing biology or genetics on anybody else, but believe me, the Vixa are good at working with their own genetic material. Any group of twenty or forty or so Vixa that included a few six-limbers could be presumed to have the capability of forming a new hive."

  "And they've used that same skill at genetics to breed themselves some castes for use as snacks?"

  Zhen Chi frowned. "Possibly. We don't know. More than likely, those helpers you saw eaten were developed from some naturally occurring nonsentient caste. The same with the other slave castes--the escorts, the laborers, and so forth."

  "So you'd go ahead and use the word 'slave.'"

  "Slavery is wrong for humans because it means taking people as sentient as you are and treating them like animals. Most people have no problem with making a horse or a dog or a camel work, but there are some people who say it's wrong. You're forcing the animal to work, and breeding away its desire for freedom."

  "Dogs and horses aren't slaves," Jamie said stubbornly.

  "Why not? Forced to work, no pay, no freedom--and deliberately bred for the work, to boot. How do they not fit the definition?"

  "I don't know. I haven't thought about it a lot."

  "The Vixa modified their equivalents of dogs and horses and cows, and used them as the raw materials to make new species, new subordinate biocastes. They breed them for work--or for food. Not so different than what humans do. We think--or at least hope--the Vixa don't modify themselves into born slaves."

  "It still freaks me out. What I saw is going to give me bad dreams for a long time."

  "Pretty much everyone at this embassy has those dreams," Zhen Chi said quietly. "Just being on the same planet with the Vixa forces us to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. But in the available universe, we have no choice but to deal with the Vixa."

  "There you are!" called a voice from a short way off.

  Jamie looked up. It was Hannah. "I've been looking for you," she said as she walked up. "Good morning, Zhen Chi."

  "Good morning."

  "Anything going on?" Hannah asked.

  "Just getting a quick biology lesson," said Jamie.

  "Well, class is over for now. Come on. We've got a lot to do."

  Jamie stood up and turned to Zhen Chi. "Thanks," he said. "I think that helped. At least I hope so."

  "Me too," she said gravely. "But fair warning--nothing does, very much. Nothing will, as long as the Vixa are the Vixa."

  TWELVE

  CAFFEINATED SOCIOLOGY

  Hannah and Jamie found the canteen without much trouble. It was the utilitarian building with the excessively cheerful, brightly
colored handmade sign reading SNACK SHACK. Just by virtue of being one of the very few splashes of cheerful color, the sign served as a reminder that everything around it was government-issue beige, utilitarian, and serious. Hannah made the private observation that officially mandated morale-raising efforts at fun and informality never did work very well.

  She flatly vetoed Jamie's suggestion that they conserve their own mealpacks and make use of embassy supplies. Food became very important in a small, remote post. Hannah knew that rummaging around in the supplies could throw off the menu planning for the week, or even the year. They might accidentally gorge on the one item that was in short supply, or blunder into some existing feud about what food belonged to whom--or worst of all, touch off a new feud that would set the two of them against the embassy staff.

  But that didn't mean they couldn't eat their own food there. Even long-store meals just tasted better eaten off a real plate with a real knife and fork. Therefore they satisfied themselves with borrowing plates, forks, utensils, and so forth--being very careful to clean up after themselves. But no matter how careful they were, they were plainly intruding on a very small club, run on a very personal basis. Hannah could see that, in a dozen little details of arrangement.

  Hannah was starting to get some ideas about how they might make use of what the Snack Shack was telling her. She left Jamie to rustle up whatever sort of meal he could from their own mealpacks while she took a look around the interior of the small canteen. It wasn't a large place, and she had seen similar layouts in any number of remote posts where people tended to stay on base a lot for whatever reason.

  There was a cooking area with stoves, ovens, freezers, refrigerators, and the like along the back wall, and an auto dishwasher in the right rear corner. A serving line ran down the center of the room, and the front half of the place was taken up with just enough seating for everyone at the embassy to squeeze in at once.

  There was an accordion-pleated flexible folding partition that could be drawn across the room, dividing it in two, and thus turning the right-hand side into a private dining room that could be reached from the outside from its own door.