"David Freer - The Forlorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Freer Dave)

on the end. They crawl up the vast body of the Morkth queen, following pheromone tracers till they
reach the soft spot in the chitinous armor, where the great vein pulses close to the surface. Then the sharp
snout is forced in through the soft tissues, and the hooks extrude. Sometimes up to a dozen drone males
may hang like small, bloated ticks just above the egg vent.

Most of the eggs would be neuter, unmaturing females, the workers and the warriors. The Queen
selected which drone male fertilized which egg, depending on the purpose of the egg. She secreted the
hormones into her bloodstream which altered the eggs to produce new drones, or new queens. The same
hormones in her blood affected the male, altering the fertility and type of gamete he produced. If a drone
gene line proved less than viable, the Queen's giant chela would pluck it off, and leave it discarded, to die
and be cleared away and eaten by the workers. It was scant wonder that the Morkth found human sex
and the emotions associated with it totally incomprehensible. One sex must, logic insisted, be just a
source of gametes, nothing more. To the Morkth this was the province of males, but their first human
male captive had shown some sign of intelligence by escaping. Therefore females in this species must be
the gamete source. It was strange, but then the entire species was strange. Decision was reached.
Thereafter the subject was closed. The noises the human sows made were not speech, just instinctive
speech imitations. They were fed, watered, washed . . . and bred.

Most of the Morkth-men gene lines were bred stupid. With pain as a punishment, and food as a reward,
workers could be trained to perform their tasks regardless of thinking ability. With intelligence-poor gene
lines, deprived of almost all sensory stimuli in the dark, small rearing cages, many females producing
dim-witted workers had become a pitiful once-human equivalent of the Morkth drones. Brood sows that
produced intelligent offspring went to the flesh renderers . . . or, if these offspring had good physical
characteristics, the females were used for warrior breeding. The genes for good warrior broodstock also
carried other linked characteristics, characteristics that had little to do with the traits the Morkth sought.
The harsh selection process had refined and reinforced both the desired and unrequired, carried-along
traits. Good warriors of the clockwork type the Morkth liked were powerfully left-brain dominant. This
made, purely incidentally, for a natural predilection toward math. . . . They were also good at logic. . . .

Since the Morkth denied that female humans were capable of speech, communication could be easy
enough, so long as one did not make too much noise. Noise caused punishment. And punishment meant
pain. The Morkth were expert in the administration of pain . . . to other Morkth. Unfortunately, the frail
humans died quite easily. The less intelligent and less logical worker brood sows, kept separately from
the warrior broodstock, had never realized that theycould talk, so long as one kept speech quiet and
away from high-pitched sounds. Their section of the hive was virtually silent, apart from quiet, purely
animal sounds.

It was different, vastly different, in the layer of hive where the warrior brood were kept. Here there was
always a susurration of low-pitched cage-to-cage talk. The human mind needs stimulus of some kind.
Without stimulus it atrophies. But speech, even only speech, can be enough to keep sanity and, if the
selection pressures favor intelligence, can produce far more . . .

The oral tradition had generated a strange and distorted picture of the outside world, passed down from
the first captives, but the women had a very real idea of the function and structure of the hive. They had
time, endless time, to talk, to theorize, to plot and to scheme, until they became reproductively
dysfunctional and were taken away to the rendering rooms. The only other distraction in the tiny cells was
one's own body, and the products thereof. The Morkth were unaware that in the eternal semidarkness of
their warrior breeders' bare cells they had been fomenting a rebellion for generations now.
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