The kids had grown up without a lot of attention… but that wasn’t so bad, Counselor said, when they were raised in big schools that crammed a lot of children into one place. Mandasars don’t mind being crammed. In fact, I knew it was good for them to be chucked in tight together, warriors and workers and gentles.

If you want the honest truth, they thrive on each other’s smell.

This is something I learned in Queen Verity’s palace: a crucial fact of Mandasar biology. They need to be surrounded by people of other castes. Every waking second, for instance, a warrior gives off a vinegary perfume (Musk A) that stimulates workers and gentles to be a bit… well, aggressive isn’t the right word. Sharp. Keen. Alert and ambitious.

It’s a pheromone that works directly on receptors in the Mandasar brain. It’s not psychological, it’s purely physical; for Mandasars, inhaling that aroma is like snorting a psychoactive drug. Only it’s more like absorbing a vitamin their brains need to work properly — without regular exposure to warrior musk, workers and gentles start to go funny in the head.

It’s the same for other castes. Workers give off a scent that keeps warriors and gentles more stable, more patient; and the fragrance of a gentle makes warriors and workers more thoughtful in both senses of the word — they reflect more on what they’re doing, and are more considerate about how their actions affect other people.

Separate the castes from each other, and their brain chemicals skitter out of balance. If you keep warriors stuck in barracks with other warriors day after day, the buildup of warrior musk keeps them hair-trigger ready for a fight… but they have no patience, and they don’t think much about what they’re asked to do. That’s great if you want bloodthirsty killing machines who don’t question their orders. In the long run, though, it doesn’t make for a smart dependable army. Or for productive law-abiding citizens.

The same with other castes. Make a segregated camp that only contains workers, and you get a drove of plodding drudges. Verity told me you could make them work long hours for zero pay, but they had no initiative and never used their wits to deal with unexpected problems.

Ditto for gentles. If they only hung around with other gentles, they ended up all brains and no common sense: ivory-tower types who were great at coming up with ideas, inventions and theories, but lousy at judging priorities. They’d be just as happy brainstorming new ways to kill people as they would be inventing medicines or things to make life better. Basically, they turned into amoral geniuses, ready to tackle any problem so long as it was interesting, and to hell with the long-term consequences.

Counselor said the kids on Celestia knew about pheromones too. They wouldn’t be whole people unless they lived in hives with all three castes in close quarters; it was the only way to keep every part of their brains wide-awake and functioning. But this bit of biology wasn’t common knowledge amongst outside races… not till those "trained human caregivers" on, Celestia began tending Mandasar children. That’s when the secret got out, and the human world started contemplating the possibilities.

Remember: Celestia had become home to sleazy profiteers. Even I could see how things might take a nasty turn.

Given a choice, the Mandasar children dearly loved to live in hives like this one: workers taking care of regular chores inside the house and around the farm; a warrior for heavy lifting and for protecting the others; a gentle to act as manager, to keep the books, to deal with customers and suppliers. They fit together as a family. The next time Counselor came into egg-heat, she and Zeeleepull would likely make a big happy clutch of hatchlings to carry on the tradition. (Egg-heat only happens once every nine years; the rest of the time, Mandasars are pretty mind-bogglingly platonic.)

But Counselor told me the sneaky slimy wheeler-dealers on Celestia didn’t care about Mandasars living balanced lives. Did warriors turn into mad dogs when you kept them apart from gentles and workers? Then they’d be perfect for guards at sweatshops and at factories that made illegal nano. Did workers turn into easy-to-control drones? That made them great for sixteen-hour shifts on assembly lines. Did gentles turn into brilliant intellectuals who didn’t fret about the effects of what they did? Then why not use them in disreputable think tanks or research institutes?

That’s what started the practice of "recruiting" on Celestia. According to Counselor, Mandasars were offered good money and benefits to sign on with various outfits, whereupon they’d be bundled off into single-caste units until their brains turned to one-track minds. The kids caught onto this pretty quick, and stopped signing up voluntarily. That’s when the recruitment process started to work more like old-time press-gangs: if you didn’t say yes to the soft sell, thugs would break into your house, gas the whole hive into unconsciousness, and take everyone away to "reorientation centers."

A month in isolation, Counselor said, and the poor Mandasars weren’t themselves anymore — the warriors would be spoiling for a fight, the workers would turn into zombies, and the gentles would be reduced to spoiled brats eager to show off how bright they were. Sure, they’d all remember the more balanced people they’d once been… but their pheromone-deprived brains just didn’t care. They were either too riled-up, too sluggish, or too giddy to be interested in changing back. Definitely, they’d never dream of complaining they were kidnapped and forced to become degenerate versions of their former selves.

In a way, they were like human adults who look back on childhood and say, "Sure, it was nice to be open and imaginative and alive, but we all have to grow up, don’t we?" Soon enough, the Mandasars stopped believing there’d ever been an alternative to their walled-up tunnel-vision lives.

But Counselor swore there were alternatives. This farming area, for instance, the Hollen Marsh: a big swath of reclaimed swampland, full of Mandasar kids living in small integrated hives. They watched out for each other with volunteer sentry patrols. The second that humans showed up, a militia of warriors would run off the intruders. That’s why Zeeleepull had charged me — he thought I was a recruiter, coming around with a bright smile and a pocketful of promises, but really spying out the territory for midnight press-gangs.

Counselor said there were other communities like theirs around Celestia: small-scale places where Mandasars could be themselves, farming or fishing or building useful things. But rumor had it that one by one, the communities were being wiped out… blitzed by recruitment gangs, families broken up and carted off to segregated isolation camps in wilderness parts of the planet. The local authorities were no help; a few took bribes from the recruiters, while the rest had been fooled by the stories Mandasars told after they’d been acclimatized: "Oh, it’s all a big fuss over nothing. We were stupid kids who wanted to live lazy unattached lives, but I feel so much better, now that I have a sense of purpose."

Well… Counselor had a sense of purpose too: to avoid the recruiters and live the way she wanted, with a healthy balanced brain. For a long time, the hive had been praying for someone to come and help them. They’d always pictured their savior as a grand and glorious queen, straight from Troyen… but maybe a blood-consort would do just as well.

Um.