<I fully perceive this. Yet—>
*I lick you do not. We span the galaxy to bring meaning to matter. Not simply within our own minds—the castles of besieged reason—but in the stars themselves.* She made the eight-legged sign.
Quath shuffled, not knowing what to reply.
*I sense your unease remains.*
Quath sent a sharp command to her podding subtask brain, willing its nervous dance to cease. <I, I have no vector.>
When the Tukar’ramin spoke again, gaudy hormonal spurts brought a new gravity to the resonant words. *You are a manifestation of a rare trait in our kind, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon.*
Afraid of exposure, she answered, <My doubts are only temporary, I assure you—>
*No. The deep secret behind our expansion from our home system I shall now reveal to you. Long ago, we encountered a race of small beings who explained the nature of the coming mech onslaught. Our savants of that time saw that our own lazy nature meant that we would fall before the mechs. So we blended genetic material with the small ones, to amplify our aggressive side.*
<They must have been fierce.>
*They were. I do not know what physical form they took, but they were both canny and persistent. In selecting these subtle mental traits from their DNA—for we shared that fundamental helical carrier—we necessarily incorporated other facets of them. One such is a capacity to doubt, to question.*
<I got their fierceness, too,> Quath said with false bravado.
*Perhaps. But you are surely the rare form we call a Philosoph. The conventional wisdom of the Synthesis, as handed down by the Illuminates, is enough for most. Even those who do not believe—such as Beq’qdahl—function well within that context. But leadership of our race depends on the Philosophs.*
<Leadership?>
*Eventually, yes—if you display the questing mind we need.*
<I…I…>
*This deep trait is what has plunged you into bleak despair after Nimfur’thon’s burning. It brings pain, but can also bring wisdom.*
<A cursed inheritance,> Quath said bitterly.
On the Tukar’ramin’s great wrinkled hide flashed a hormonal code. *We will encrust you. A small addition for your new task.*
<The prospecting—>
*Is not spiritually fitting for you. We are lacking labor in the Hive itself, due to the mining. Here I will sense you better, as you work. There—you have the code? Apply to the Factotum and be encrusted with your new tool.*
A gesture told Quath her audience was done. She skittered away. Liberation from prospecting! And an encrustation—!
Next to promotion, which would mean an added pod, encrustation was the highest tribute to a podder. Quath could preen in the warrens, displaying her addition without baldly announcing it. A plus, definitely. Yes. Her spirits rose.
Quath clattered past Danni’vver, hurrying to the nearest terminal. She beeped the code number and awaited the news, her servos humming. She could ponder the odd news of her nature later, when there was time. After all, she was a Philosoph—whatever that strange name implied.
The screen flickered fretted ivory. An image of the new tool formed.
Gorge rose in Quath, an acrid blue that rasped her thorax. Swimming before her was a stapling gun. A simple, brainless tool.
A simpleton encrustation so low as to be an insult.
EIGHT
The days passed with an ache in each hour.
Quath had some use of the stapling gun, occasionally tacking machines and crates to the Hive walls in the company of a rabble of robots she directed. The small Hive creatures squeaked and jibbered in their stuttering minilanguage. Quath felt a stab of embarrassment whenever an acquaintance happened by.
But in time this faded. After all, she was laboring, like all the podia, and gradually she came to feel that this was her rightful station. Facts had their own hardness, but one could sleep upon them.
Quath did not mind the studied way some myriapodia now ignored her conversation. There was always someone to talk to, anyway. The myriapodia were distant and boring, in truth; they cared only for their many mechanical jewelments, and how to acquire yet one more.
Aeons ago the idea must have seemed a good one, Quath thought: augment the podia as they aged, to use their experience and shore up the stiffening organs. But now these encrusted mammoths preened more than they worked. And the Quath they snubbed, the quadpodder they passed without seeing as she labored among brainless robots—that Quath knew that these bright myriapodia would inevitably vanish forever, no matter how many stringy muscles and clogged veins they replaced.
One night Quath passed a gang of miners and prospectors as she returned alone to the communal webbing, down the inert gray arterial corridors. One called out, <Come, pay respect!>
<To whom?> Quath asked, tired.
<Beq’qdahl! The Tukar’ramin has newly six-podded our friend!>
<For what?> Quath had heard no news.
<You jibe, wall-tacker.>
<No. For what?>
<She found a rich new seam of palazinia today.>
<I see. A lucky find.>
<More than luck! Craft! Spiracles that sniff out rarity. That we go to celebrate!>
