Well, that Ortega had said that the brain would provide for such things, he told himself; but he was exceedingly nervous as he approached one of the creatures coming down the road.
The other saw him and stopped.
“What are you doing just standing there, Markling?” the newcomer challenged sternly. “Don’t you have any work to do?”
Hain was stunned. The language was a series of incredibly rapid pulsations transmitted in some way from the creature’s antennae to his own, yet he had understood everything! All but the last word, anyway. He decided to try to talk back.
“Please. I am newly born to this world, and I need help and guidance,” he began, then felt his own antennae quiver incredibly quickly as he talked. It worked!
“What the hell?” responded the gruff stranger, although not really in those terms. Hain’s brain automatically seemed to translate into familiar symbols. “You sick or something?”
“No, no,” Hain protested. “I have just come from Zone, where I have just awakened as one of you.”
The other thought about that for a minute. “I’ll be damned! An Entry! Haven’t had one in over ten years!” Suddenly the old skepticism returned. “You’re not just saying that to shirk, are you?”
“I assure you that I am what I say, and that up until a very short time ago I was of a totally different race and form.”
“You adjust pretty well,” the other noted. “Most of ’em have the creeping fits for days. Well, I’ll take you over to the nearest government house and it’ll be their problem. I have work to do. Follow me.” With that, it started on down the road, and Hain followed.
His guide was almost a third larger than he was, Hain saw. Most of the creatures he passed seemed to be about the same size or smaller than he. A few big ones were around, and they seemed to be the bosses.
They walked past several of the huge cones, then up the side of one that looked no different from the rest and into the hole on top. Hain noted that the opening was so even because it was rimmed with metal, like an open hatch. He almost lost his nerve on entering. The aboveground part of the cone, about ten meters worth, was hollow to the outside structure. They were not only walking down, but at an angle.
When they passed ground level, they walked onto a floor which was also some kind of metal. Tunnels lined with tile, with neon or some similar lighting stretching down in long tubes, led away like spokes on a wheel. They were wide enough to hold two of the creatures abreast, and they passed several as his guide led him down a near one.
Doorless openings into large chambers filled with all sorts of strange stuff, often with dozens of the creatures working, were passed before they reached one with a hexagon in lights over the doorway. Inside the hex was a wide gray ring, then a smaller black one, then a white dot. It reminded Hain with some amusement of the view of his guide’s posterior, with its menacing stinger.
Several small and medium-sized creatures were working, apparently at some sort of paperwork, Hain noted with curiosity. Huge printing machines, like typewriters, were all over, with television screens displaying what the creatures, using their forward legs, were typing on a strange keyboard. The keyboard was a series of apparently identical cubes, forty or fifty of them, which lit momentarily as they were touched. A crazy dot pattern emerged on the screens in no apparent logical order or pattern. When the screen was filled, a hind leg would kick a large stud and the screen would go blank—and they would be back to typing again.
So I can’t read the language, Hain noted to himself. Well, can’t have everything.
The guide waited patiently until somebody noticed him and looked up from its keyboard.
“Yes?” asked the worker and the communicated tone was one of irritated nastiness.
“Found this Markling on the road, claims to be an Entry,” said the big guide in that same annoyed tone he had used with Hain.
There was that word again. What in seven hells was a Markling, anyway?
“Just a moment,” the clerk or whatever it was said, “I’ll see if His Highness will see you.”
The office worker went into a side door and stayed several minutes. Hain’s hunger was increasing, and so was his apprehension. A hereditary empire, he thought. Well, it could be worse.
Finally the clerk reappeared. “His Highness will see the Entry,” she said—for some reason Hain automatically thought of his guide as masculine and the receptionist and most of the other workers as feminine. The guide moved forward.
“Just the Entry,” said the clerk sharply. “You will return to your duties.”
“As you say,” the other replied, and turned and left.
Hain gathered up his courage and entered the doorway.
Inside was the biggest creature he had ever seen. But there was something else unusual about him.
The hairs on his body were white.
Hain suddenly realized just how hereditary this monarchy was.
There were some boxes and bags around of more or less conventional design, and one of those typewriters with a much larger screen. Nothing else. The big one reared back on the last four of his eight legs. Hain was impressed and cowed; he hadn’t seen anyone else doing that.
“What’s your name, Entry?” the big white one demanded imperiously. The tone, Hain realized by now, was conveyed by the intensity of the signal.
“Datham Hain, Your Highness,” he replied in the most respectful way he could.
The official ran his tongue over his beak in thought. Finally, he went over to the typewriter and started punching up something—something short, Hain saw, because the screen was still almost empty when the large creature punched the send bar or whatever it was. A moment’s wait. Then the screen started to fill with those funny dots.
The official read the message carefully, studying it for several minutes. Finally it turned back to him as he stood there impatiently, needing almost four meters to negotiate the move.
“Ordinarily, Hain, we’d just train and condition you to a position and you’d fit in or die.” Hain’s heart—if he still had one—sank. “But,” the royal official continued, “in this case we have special use for you. Too bad you turned up a Markling, but that’s to be expected. You’ll be quartered near here—I’ll have one of my assistants show you where. There’s a commissary three doors down. Most of you Entries come through starving, so go in there and eat your fill. Don’t worry about what it is—we can eat just about anything. Wait in your quarters until I get instructions from Imperial Headquarters.”
Hain still stood there, digesting all this. Finally, he said, “Your Highness, might I be permitted one question?”
“Yes, yes,” the other said impatiently. “What is it?”
“What’s a Markling?”
“Hain,” replied the official patiently, “life is hard and cheap in the Akkafian Empire. Infant mortality is extremely high, not only from normal factors imposed by nature but for other reasons you’ll find out sooner or later for yourself. As a result, to ensure racial continuation, about fifty females are born for every male.
“A Markling is a female Akkafian, Hain. You’ve had a sex change.”
Datham Hain was led by one of the office staff to the commissary, which proved to be a large room filled with strange animals, plants, and worms, some still alive. Feeding as an Akkafian was not pleasant, at least to Hain’s unnormalized psyche, but it was necessary. The creatures frankly didn’t taste all that bad—in fact, they didn’t taste very much at all, but they filled the void in what seemed to be multiple stomachs. If he didn’t think about what he was eating, the changeling discovered, it went down all right.
That tongue, like a sticky whip, was infinitely controllable. Live prey were simply picked up, thrown to the rear sting area to be paralyzed, then held and fed by the mandibles a little at a time through the beak.
Discovering that he was now a she wasn’t much of a shock to Hain; the odds were that sexuality was so different among these people that it probably didn’t make much difference anyway. What
