From somewhere came the monody of dripping waters. A sickening, silent iridescence filled the chamber of horrors with a clear yellow light. Ward’s eyes focused on—
He shrank back away from the awesome height and the narrow slit of white light high, high above through the mist that might have been the new Martian sun. His eyes kept returning to the thing in the middle of the cavern floor. It rested in a transparent plastic bowl that sat on top of a huge iridescent bell-shaped stalagmite built up through thousands of years of dripping calcareous water.
Inside the bowl rested a giant slug-like body. It exuded a greyish glow as it pulsed and shimmied. Two vast compound eyes looked out into the cavern and a number of simpler eyes moved slowly about with a placid kind of rhythm.
“The Queen,” he whispered, repeating the word of the woman-creature. He’d thought it part of a nightmare. His whisper echoed violently through the cavern like a rising wind of fear. The Queen of the Mo-Sanshon. The Queen Mother. Summation, final cause, goal, archetype, of the State.
The woman-creature moved, eyes fixed on the bowl as though communicating.
She finally turned toward where Ward crouched helplessly on the cold, moist stone, his crushed leg projecting out uselessly. The nerveless face moved, gave out sounds like frost. “Our Queen has decided. You know where the cage of mercenaries is. You had it on the Sol. Because of your inferior nervous system which is so vulnerable to attack, you will soon give us the information we want. You and the cage are all that stands in our way.”
“I don’t know where it is,” said Ward truthfully. “So regardless of what you do to my inferior nerves, I can’t tell you where it is. Someone else took it with them from the Sol. Of course you don’t believe me.”
The great sentient blob of breeding-brain machinery called the Queen Mother, pulsed on without perturbation. The creature beside him seemed unaffected; yet both of them must be trembling with fear, hate and indecision. An organization of females. And up there was the one Queen Mother for the lot of them who layed all the eggs of her species, and dictated the policies for the rest. The workers, soldiers, nurses—everyone was female. Even those who had assumed male humanoid form, such as the Executive Officer on the Sol and the Guard in the Federal Building, they were also female.
And the male—those representatives, those voters of humanoid cultures—where were they? They didn’t exist as such. They were simply created as mates for the younger Queens. After the marriage flight they died, after a brief wholly utilitarian span devoted solely to the continuation of the Colony.
And he, Ward, a lowly Male, stood in their way. Ward reasoned that only through intense study over centuries of time had they been able to grasp enough humanoid concepts to even be able to recognize such an impossible situation. He, a lowly male—part of a ruling class!