The Golden Queen

by David Farland

  Gallen asked so many questions of one little Woodari named Fargeth that the little man said, “Your vast ignorance amuses me, but I have work to do. You are so full of questions, why do you not go to the pidc?”

  “The pidc?” Gallen asked. “What is that?”

  “It is a place where all the questions you can ask in a lifetime will be answered in moments.”

  “Where is it?” Gallen asked. “What do they charge for their service?”

  Fargeth laughed. “Knowledge carries its own price. Gain it to your dismay.”

  Gallen wandered the halls until he spotted the creator at work in his stall, making a child. In his past two days here in the city, the old alien was the only person Gallen met whom he genuinely liked. Gallen recalled the sadness in the old creature’s voice as he talked of “troubles in the city.” Gallen suddenly knew that the old man was an enemy to the dronon.

  Gallen said, “A friend of mine has been taken by Lord Karthenor of the aberlains. I need to learn how to free her. Can you tell me where the pidc is?”

  The old toadman nodded. “I feared such a thing might befall you. I will take you there.”

  The toadman unhooked the various mechanical devices from his back, led Gallen down a familiar corridor to a business where young parents took children into little cubicles, set them in plush chairs, then attached silver bands to their children’s heads for hours at a time. The bands had a calming effect on the children, and Gallen had thought this was the only benefit the devices imparted.

  The creator set Gallen in a white chair, showed Gallen how to strap a silver band to his temples, and whispered, “Good luck, my friend. For most people, this is all they ever learn in life, and a session here becomes the end of knowledge. If you were from Motak, you would know that filling your mind with trivia is only the beginning of study. Right action will lead to greater light.”

  The toadman left, and Gallen held the silver strip a moment. He placed it on his head as if it were a crown. A gray mist seemed to form before Gallen’s eyes. The room went dark, and in the distance he could see a bright pinpoint of light. A voice within the light said, “I am the teacher. Open yourself to knowledge. What do you wish to know?”

  Gallen couldn’t decide where to begin. “I know nothing of your people or customs. I can’t figure out what your machines are, or how they work—”

  “I can teach you of people and customs—save those things that each community might consider too sacred to share. I can teach you the basics of all technology, though each industry has its own manufacturing secrets that are private property.”

  “Teach me,” Gallen said. And if Maggie’s education was rough and painful, Gallen’s was sweet and filled with light. It began with a knowledge of mathematics that coursed into him evenly—beginning with the basics of number theory, moving up through advanced spatial geometry. There, mathematics branched into physics and he learned about subatomic particles, relativity, and Gallen memorized the various equations for the unified field theory and its many corollaries.

  Then the introduction to physics moved into applied technologies, and Gallen was given to understand the workings of starships and incendiary rifles and gravcars and ten thousand other items.

  He learned how thinking machines developed until they reached the point where they began evolving on their own and now could store more information than any human. The Guides were one form of teaching machines, but they included invasive technologies that let the Guide control the wearer. The chainmail headdresses, called mantles, like the one worn by Everynne were a more advanced type of personal intelligence that did not seek to dominate its wearer, and beyond these were a realm of intelligences that had nothing to do with mankind.

  Gallen studied nanotechnology and learned how war machines were built. He learned about the development of viviforms and artefs and genetically upgraded humans—and he learned of some creatures that appeared to be biological in their construction but straddled the line between creature and machine.

  He learned how the World Gates tapped into the power of a singularity, a black hole, where time and space were warped to the point that they did not exist, so that those who walked through the gate were whisked in a stream of atoms and recreated at a chosen destination.

  At the end of an hour, Gallen’s head was sweaty. The teacher interrupted the session. “You are learning too much, too quickly,” it said. “Your brain can form only a limited number of neurological connections within a given time. Now, you must rest.”

  “When can I come back?” Gallen asked.

  “You will need to eat, nourish yourself, and return tomorrow,” the teacher answered.

  Gallen rose from his chair, and the world seemed to spin. He fell down, grabbed the chair to support himself, and waited until he felt steady enough to walk to a cafeteria. He ate heavily and felt gloriously elated for an hour, then found himself slightly nauseated and absentminded.

  In three hours, his head began to clear. He walked through the bazaar for a bit and felt a new man. He looked at the vendors with new eyes now, appreciating the craftsmanship of their wares, understanding the utility of items that he could not have fathomed hours before. Indeed, he had become a new man. Before, he had walked through the bazaar shaking his head in wonder, certain that many items worked on principles of magic beyond his ken. Now he saw that there was no magic—only creativity and craft.

  He watched the people with open eyes, marking those who wore personal intelligences. Those who wore Guides, he saw now, were often slaves or bond servants. Some submitted to the indignity of wearing a Guide in the hope of earning greater rewards.

  Those who wore the chainmail headdresses called “mantles” were vastly wealthy in ways that Gallen had not imagined. Their mantles served them and were far more intelligent than the little Guides.

  Merchants were frequently freemen who made themselves useful, but the vast majority of mankind were worthless in this society, and so long as they were free to eat and breed and be entertained, they seemed content.

  Here on Fale, there was no need for a man with a strong back or quick wit. There was nothing a human could do that an android could not do better. So those who did not have some type of relationship with a personal intelligence—either as a possessor or as one possessed—were considered only waste, the excess of humanity. And as Gallen studied the peons of Fale, he began to see that behind the well-fed faces, there was a haunted, cramped look.

  Gallen went to his camp that night and lay looking up at the stars, smelling the wind. On this world, despite all of his strivings, the people would consider him worthless, and this was something that he had never imagined.

  He considered what Karthenor had done. Perhaps in the lord’s mind, by giving Maggie a Guide, he had made her a person of worth, bestowed upon her some dignity. Yet such a gift was bound to carry a terrible price.

  On the morning of her third day on Fale, Maggie’s Guide completed the task of injecting its own artificial neural network into Maggie’s nervous system. The Guide now commanded a secondary network of neurons that led through all of her extremities, so that it could control the rate of Maggie’s pulse and breathing, feel with her fingers and toes, watch with her eyes, and hear with her ears.

  When it finished, it reported its progress to Maggie, flashing a three-dimensional image of the new nervous system to her. A sense of panic rose in her when she saw what had happened, but the Guide did not tickle her, did not send her its calm assurances. Instead, it left her with her fears.

  Now that the Guide had extended its control over her, it announced that it was free to begin its greater work of teaching Maggie the intricacies of genetic manipulation. The Guide gave her routine tasks for the day. During one marathon twenty-hour work session, Maggie extracted, sorted, and upgraded over a hundred egg cells from one woman. Afterward, she added genetic enhancements to several hundred thousand sperm. She then mixed the cells and put them in the incubator before she left for the night. Her
Guide reported her daily accomplishments to Karthenor, and Karthenor set up a credit account to give her advances on the future earnings of the children she was creating. In time, one hundred children would each pay her one percent of their life earnings. In one day, she had sewn a crop that would in time reap a fortune. The Guide made sure that she understood and felt properly grateful to be so employed.

  As she worked that day, there was little to distract her. In the late afternoon, she heard an explosion in a storage room. For a few moments sirens blared and dronon vanquishers rushed through the smoke-filled compound, securing the area. Maggie could hear the screams of a wounded woman. Her guide merely informed her that terrorists had exploded a small bomb, and one of her fellow workers was injured. The Guide instructed Maggie to continue working.

  Maggie was too heavily tranquilized to even consider disobeying. All through the morning, the Guide had been dumping information into her, data gleaned from genetic engineering experiments over eighteen thousand years from a hundred thousand worlds. A thousand distinct subspecies of mankind had been formed in that time, and billions of minor alterations had been tried. Maggie learned how to engineer people to live underwater, in reduced or increased gravities, or to cope with chemically altered atmospheres.

  Yet the dronon Guide also taught her the glorious plans that it had for Maggie’s people, and as the plans unfolded, Maggie was tickled so that she felt as if she were floundering in a pool of ecstasy. The genes that Maggie inserted into that day’s batch of children were specifically designed to decrease a female’s infant mortality rate and at the same time engineer a subspecies of future women to become breeders. These breeders would bear litters of ten or more children. The women that Maggie engineered would be tall, languid, wide at the hips, and would spend a great deal of time eating. They would require little in the way of cerebral stimulation—would shun mental exercise, physical stimulation. In effect, they would be sacks to bear children.

  In a few days, Maggie knew that she would be allowed to work on a second subspecies of females who would be sterile workers, filled with an incredible amount of nervous energy that would be released in the joyful pursuit of labor. Other colleagues were developing males that would consist of one subspecies of dreamy-eyed artisans and creators, while another subspecies would form a caste of giant warriors with superb reflexes, immense strength, and an instinct for killing. These would burn a path across the galaxies, uniting all mankind under a common banner.

  In all aspects, human society would come to emulate the more perfect dronon society, and the worlds would embrace a new, superior order.

  That night, Maggie ate a quick dinner and then threw herself on her bed, contemplating the riches she had earned. Her Guide tickled her so that her blood raced at the thrill of it.

  A few minutes later, her Guide announced a visitor only seconds before he entered the room.

  He was a tall man, perhaps twenty-five years of age, with pale blond hair. The sculpted muscles of his chest and shoulders revealed a body type that Maggie recognized from her studies—the human equivalent of a dronon technician.

  He entered her small bedroom and sat in her single chair. He watched Maggie with an intensity peculiar to those raised in dronon society. It was as if Maggie were food, and the man was feeding on her with his gleaming blue eyes.

  “My name is Avik,” he said. “Lord Karthenor asked me to speak with you. He feels that you are not adjusting well to your new assignments. You’ve been distressed, and your Guide is devoting considerable resources in an effort to make you happy. Is there anything I can do to make you happy?”

  Maggie stared at him, and it was as if suddenly her Guide shut off, and she was falling, swirling toward ruin. The false euphoria left her, and she felt helpless, abused, physically exhausted. Her head was spinning with visions of the children she was creating, the mothers with their vast wombs, the legions of sexless workers, the deadly warriors with their quick wits and killer’s eyes.

  Maggie found herself sputtering, trying in one quick burst to express the rage and horror that the Guide had been suppressing for two days now.

  “I can’t …” she cried helplessly. She wanted to launch herself at Avik, claw his eyes out, but the Guide would not let her.

  Avik took her hands, held them. “What you need,” he said softly, “is another human to help you cope with this change.”

  Maggie glared at him and thought, If there were another human in this room, I would do that. She was painfully aware that Avik’s enhancements made him unlike other men. He had a dreamy look in his eyes, a soft-spoken nature, a predisposition to move his hands as he spoke. In every way he was a dronon technician, as distinct in his characteristics as a bloodhound would be among mongrels. Yet Maggie could not hate him for something he could not change.

  “Set me free,” Maggie pleaded. “I can’t live the way you want me to.”

  “Of course you can,” Avik said. “It takes time, but you can become dronon. In fact, you have no choice in the matter. Believe me, you will find peace among us.”

  “I can’t,” Maggie said. “Don’t you see how different they are from us? We weren’t meant to live like the dronon.”

  “The differences between us and the dronon are superficial,” Avik said. “They have chitin, we have skin. But we are both a species of conquerors, and both of us found the need to overwhelm nature, expand our domain to the stars. Do you realize how few sentient species have done this?”

  “We are nothing like them!” Maggie shouted. “If we were, they wouldn’t need to force us into their castes.…”

  Avik smiled, sat back smugly. “They are not forcing us into castes. Don’t you see what they are doing? They are merely enhancing the differences that already exist between us. Even in the natural state, some of your men are born to be warriors. The urge to compete in them is so overwhelming that they can hardly control it.” Maggie suddenly thought of Gallen. “And others of your men are like me, dreamers and creators. Some of your people are workers—unable to stop, unable to enjoy any other facet of life but the workplace. And some of you are nurturers, breeders who find comfort in sprawling families and take joy in raising children. And some of you are born to become leaders. In every age of humanity, it has been this way. The hive mind is within us, just as it is within the dronon. Believe me, once your people make the transition to our order, your children will enjoy greater peace and prosperity than they have ever known.”

  It was disconcerting in a way to watch Avik, so human in form, talk about humans as if they were alien. But she could see the alienness in his eyes, in the hungry way he watched her.

  “But you have no freedom. Our children will have no choice in their decisions,” Maggie shouted. She found herself shaking with rage, her muscles spasming.

  “Perhaps we lose a little,” Avik countered, “but we gain much in return. We have no crime on dronon worlds, for the Guides do not allow it. We have no confusion over making simple choices. We don’t spend vast portions of our youth uselessly vacillating as we struggle to learn what we shall become. Among the hives, each child knows what he or she will do as an adult. We are bred to our positions, and we do find peace, a peace that is greater and more profound than any you can imagine. It may appear to be a contradiction, but though our laws seem restrictive to you, they free us to find that peace.” Avik spoke evenly, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. Maggie looked into his wild eyes, wanted to shout him down, yet he so obviously believed in the dronon order, she realized that to argue would be futile.

  Still, she could not resist the temptation to say more. “Avik, don’t you see—your order doesn’t really free you, it merely limits you. You could choose to be more than an architect—you could become anything you want: a father, a leader, a warrior. The dronon haven’t freed you. They’ve merely made you comfortable. You have become content slaves, when you could be gods.”

  Avik’s nostrils flared. Maggie could see that she’d struck a chord. He bac
ked up in his chair, looked at her appraisingly. “You will never speak against the order again.”

  Maggie tried to argue, but the Guide stopped her tongue and would not let her speak, so that his words seemed to carry the weight of a prophecy.

  Avik got up from his chair, put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I will instruct your Guide to continue tutoring you in the ways of the dronon, and in your job. Each time you think of the order, your Guide will give you comfort, and perhaps in this way, over time, you will learn to love the order. Tomorrow you will begin working on the Adoration Project, and as you learn to love our order, you will in turn be teaching others to love it. Maggie, don’t fight us. You can’t win, and you might get hurt in the struggle.”

  He cupped her chin in one hand, and her Guide sent her a spasm of lust that knotted her stomach and made her face burn. She tried to fight it, to give vent to her anger, but she realized that Avik was controlling her Guide, forcing this emotion on her. “You’re such a pretty thing. I like red hair. Lord Karthenor has asked me to give you physical companionship. You will find that having sex while wearing a Guide is more compelling than anything you have ever dreamed. No beast in heat will ever find greater satisfaction than you will find with me this night.”

  Maggie locked her legs together and curled up in a ball on the bed. She knew that fighting would be no use. Her Guide could take control of her muscles at any moment, force her to open her legs and give herself to him. But she needed to do this, to commit one small act of defiance.