One way to find out: I’d just had a lot fresher dose of venom squish onto my cheeks in the escape pod. "Um," I said, "do you, uhh, smell the same thing on my face?"

All five Mandasars leaned their muzzles toward me. Their whiskers quivered as they drew nearer, looking nervous and eager, both at once…

The workers jumped back like I’d whacked them in the snouts. Zeeleepull held his ground but whipped his head away, nearly gouging me with his nose spike by accident. As for Counselor, she just dropped in a dead faint, planting her face into the deep dark soil.

Fast as I could, I knelt and lifted Counselor out of the dirt. Gentles are the smallest caste of Mandasars; they look frail and fragile in comparison to warriors or workers, but they still weigh as much as a hefty human adult. And they’re all floppy-awkward to pick up.

"Let’s get her inside," I said to her hive-mates. They didn’t answer. They were still all gaping in shock — fresh venom must pack quite a wallop to the Mandasar nose. Struggling on my own, I lugged Counselor through the door of the nearest environment dome, then set her on one of the lounging pallets around the dining-room table.

The communal water bowl was still half-full from lunch. I started to splash Counselor’s face and neck, mostly because I didn’t know a truly useful way to help her recover. When a gentle faints, it isn’t from shock or anything like that — it’s actually more of a trance, when she’s come up against something that needs a whole lot of thought. Her conscious mind shuts down so her unconscious can go into overdrive… kind of like a computer letting its external interface go blank so it can use all its processing power internally. Counselor would wake up when her brain had come to grips with the venom she smelled; but I still kept splashing, because I had to do something.

While I splashed, I had time to peek around the dome’s interior. More than anything, it looked like one of the "heritage chambers" at Queen Verity’s palace: a room where you stored stuff that was too historical to throw out, but too many centuries out of fashion to actually use. The dining table was a perfect example. Laminated on its surface was a glossy reproduction of a two-hundred-year-old Troyenese painting: the one of old Queen Wisdom rising from the sea after sporting with the first envoy from the League of Peoples. It’s as famous to Mandasars as the Mona Lisa is to humans… and that means it’s a great whopping cliche you’d never want to show in your home.

At least, that’s how people felt on Troyen. Things might be different on Celestia. I could imagine a hive buying the Queen Wisdom table as a joke, the way kids in their twenties get a kick out of kitschy old treasures; but maybe these kids didn’t know the Queen Wisdom painting was corny and old-fashioned. As one of the few works of Mandasar art known to the outside world, maybe they thought it was special and important — a connection to their lost home planet.

The same could go for the mish-mosh of other knick-knacks around the dome: a cheap little rain-stick from Queen Honor’s continent, Rupplish; a pair of sharp iron tips that bolted onto a warrior’s pincers… something no one on Troyen had used since preindustrial days; a little needlepoint sampler with words written in one of the ancient pictograph languages. I didn’t know which language, which continent, or how long ago these particular picto-graphs had been edged out by the unromantic efficiency of an alphabet.

The nobles back in Queen Verity’s palace would have flicked their whiskers at such a rummage of decorations clumped in one room. The stuff didn’t go together: antiquey things from a dozen different ages and regions, all dating back at least a hundred years. But the pieces weren’t real antiques; they weren’t even good fakes. Every hunk of bric-a-brac looked gleaming and modern, as if Celestia had a hundred factories knocking off shiny-bright copies of old Troyenese things… whatever artwork and gewgaws the outside world happened to have pictures of.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these kids, how they were ready to buy anything that was sort of a kind of a teeny bit like mementos from Troyen. They didn’t mind mixing stuff together from all three continents and heaven knows how many eras of history, so long as it brought back memories of their birth world.

So lonely. So homesick.

But as much as I felt sorry for them, I felt pretty proud too… the way they hung on, trying to stay connected to a planet they only half remembered. Big red Zeeleepull had never heard the word Naizo, even though it’d been standard for centuries… but he knew the longer phrase, the original, like some cherished hand-me-down from the medieval warriors who’d invented it.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw what was really going on: the Mandasars here weren’t just twenty-year-old kids, they were children. No matter how grownup their bodies had got, their house was like a tree fort filled with a hodgepodge of valuable junk they’d pulled out of trash heaps or bought for a penny. None of this was sad and pathetic, or even noble; it was just what youngsters did while they were rehearsing to own adult things.

Even if a Queen Wisdom table was still tacky, tacky, tacky.

The other four hive-mates trooped in from outside just as Counselor started to wake. From the looks on their faces, Zeeleepull and the workers had mumbled and grumbled about what to do with me but hadn’t come to any conclusion. All Mandasars can make decisions when they have to, but if there’s a gentle handy, the other castes give her the deciding vote. I don’t know if that’s instinct or just habit; the gentles all swear it’s biologically hardwired, how other castes defer to them… but warriors and workers claim they only do it because gentles whine when they don’t get their own way.

Counselor blinked and twitched her whiskers a few times, shaking off the water I’d splashed on her face. Suddenly, she sat bolt-upright, staring at me in horror. "You smell…"

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Zeeleepull muttered, "Stinky hume," while the workers crowded in to see if Counselor was okay. They did all the standard things worried Mandasar moms do with children: patting Counselor’s face to check for fever; examining the color of her fingertips; sniffing the tiny musk glands at the base of her tail to make sure she didn’t smell injured.

I looked down at those button-sized glands myself. If Counselor had become a queen when she was little, those glands would have ballooned into huge green sacs.

"The smell on my face," I said to them all. "It’s venom. From a Mandasar queen."

That sent the five of them into another bout of whisker-twitching shock. With Zeeleepull, the shock only took half a second to swoop into outrage. "Dare you to pretend—"

"I’m not pretending," I interrupted. "It’s the truth."

"Then worse!" Zeeleepull yelled. The burning-wood odor of Battle Musk B began to pour off him like smoke. Thirty seconds of that and he’d go berserk… especially in the dining room’s enclosed space, where his own musk would fill the air and whip him to frenzy. Counselor put her hand to his cheek, and whispered, "Calm, calm," but Zeeleepull just kept yelling.

"If a hume, dirty awful you, dares to wear sacred venom like… like perfume…"

Uh-oh. It’s too complicated to explain now, but one of the causes of Troyen’s civil war was snooty-pants aliens riling the populace by dousing themselves with Mandasar pheromones. Zeeleepull obviously knew that… and in his mind, he’d suddenly identified me with the troublemakers who drove Troyen over the edge.

The workers were snorting and trembling now, half-scared to death by the Musk B in the air. That particular type of musk always terrifies nonwarrior castes. A scent specifically evolved to stimulate the fear response, a Mandasar scientist once told me. Counselor hollered, "Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo," but Zeeleepull was too far gone for that to have an effect. The words only work when everyone’s cool-headed, not when a warrior desperately wants to run riot.