17: the Imperial Flaw

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“So the main important factor is that the Out-Western Aljik Empire is not, in fact, an empire,” Kate explained. “I’m sure that Glath did as best he could translating from a stack of dictionaries with no knowledge of human culture, but to call this nest an ‘empire’, in the sense that we human English-speakers understand the term, is woefully misleading.”

“Okay,” I said. We were in my quarters, on the Oval Nine. (The boys were taking a tour of the ship with Glath.) Kate hadn’t wanted to have this conversation over comms, preferring to hash it out between us before trying to involve any aljik; I’d been reluctant to bring my family onto the ship with the shyr on it, but the boys had clamoured to see ‘mummy’s ship’ and I’d caved. Besides, the shyr was probably right – the more time they spent on the Red Four, the higher the chances that the crew there would learn that they were the dreaded Singers in Light, and an unpredictable Empire-loyal crew could very well be more of a danger than a single already-captured shyr. The Red Four had been cowed into helping my family so far, but the instant they felt less intimidated by them, or intimidated by them that they thought that they posed a threat to the Empire, that could change very quickly.

I’m not an idiot. I knew that the shyr had probably said that to convince me to bring them over so that she could have another shot at killing them if she managed to escape custody. But that didn’t make it less true. The Red Four could very well be a threat, and no matter what ship they were on, she still wasn’t. No amount of shyr stealth, strategy or poison would get her out of the chamber she’d been trapped in, past a door physically barricaded from the outside that not even a tahl would be able to force her way through. She was under video surveillance with two tahl guarding the barred door from the outside, and strict orders not to open the door for any reason, even if the shyr threatened her own life. When the door did have to be opened to feed her, it wasn’t to be done without direct Queen approval, and a door further down the corridor would be barred from outside and guarded and not unbarred until the shyr was once again barred behind the inner door. If she tried to attack the tahl bringing her food, they were authorised to kill her; if she bested and paralysed both of them and tried to use them as hostages, the tahl behind the second barred door were instructed not to listen. All that anything but strict compliance could buy her was cutting off her own food supply.

So accepting the aboard the Oval Nine was the lesser threat.

“Of course, ‘empire’ itself is a heavily value-loaded term whose definition changes over time,” Kate continued, “but Tatik’s nest doesn’t meet any of those definitions. An empire, as most would understand it, requires multiple nations or territories being brought under the dominion of a singular nation, an imperial core. Humans usually form nations for a combination of two reasons. One is to control strategic locations to hold power against rival nations, in military or trade. The other one, the big one, is resource extraction – some smaller, weaker nation has something that the imperial core wants, so they’re brought into the empire for the purposes of obtaining it.

“Empires require a few things. They need efficient communication and travel across their expanse – if you can’t get messages from or troops to a territory relatively quickly, that territory won’t be part of your empire for very long. They require a modular form of tiered government that allows new territories to be easily added to the existing empire or for territories to be lost without needing any major structural changes. And they need a mutable ruling class that can be grown or shrunk in size as needs must; a smaller imperial core is a wealthier imperial core, but also a less powerful imperial core. The criteria for who the main enforcers and beneficiaries of the empire are, whether divided by class or nationality or earned qualification, must be adjustable by being able to adjust the criteria.

“And the thing about the aljik is that they are fundamentally incapable of most of these things. They have, through trial and error, developed rudimentary methods of dealing with other species, establishing trade and enforcing a handful of big laws like the quarantine around Earth, but they can’t really be said to control foreign territories. Trade itself is interesting; I spoke to Captain Sil about the trade routes and they don’t seem to trade with other nests, which is confusing and fascinating to me. I have to assume that prior to space travel, ground-bound nests traded with each other, because I cannot fathom a species getting into space without inventing trade; but of course, that might just be my own human bias talking. Anyway, not only are they not acting as an empire, but their biology would make it incredibly difficult for them to do so. Their biological castes are inflexible; adaptation to new scenarios takes a full generation, and their reproductive strategy is fundamentally limiting. The enforcers of imperial interests cannot grow to match the size of the empire, because their numbers are fundamentally restricted by how many eggs the Queen can lay. It’s impossible for the enforcing class to grow, so it is impossible for the empire to grow, even if they had one. Their influence would be fundamentally limited by a lack of manpower.”

“Okay,” I said. “And this affects the ahlda somehow?”

“To understand what I think is happening with the ahlda, it’s important to understand what Queen Tatik’s “empire” is. It is a nest. One single aljik nest, probably no larger than a nest on a planet, because she can only lay so many eggs. A nest that is very, very spread out across space. And on all sides, empires that adopted her great-grandmother’s model; empires that are the same. A nest, holding a vast territory from other aljik.”

“Okay, so…”

“So, it’s too big. My which I mean it takes u too much physical space. The ahlda aren’t making it because they’re being asked to travel absolutely ridiculous distances.”

I stared. “It can’t possibly be that simple. They would have thought of that.”

“Would they, though? One thing that’s been clearly evident in looking at extraterrestrial species is that they have, from a human perspective, massive blind spots. Humans quite likely have massive blind spots of our own, but the point here is that humans are generalists, like bears, and aljik clearly are not. Just because they behave in a way that indicates cognition doesn’t mean that we can assume that their cognition is fundamentally similar to ours. I tried to ask about pre-spaceflight aljik nests and didn’t learn all that much, which isn’t surprising, I mean if someone randomly cornered me and asked me about territory sized of stone age tribes I probably wouldn’t be able to tell them very much either. But looking at their nest structures, we can make some inferences. Aljik are not nomadic, aside from young Queens and their escorts leaving nests to establish new ones. There is some minimal level of population drift between neighbouring nests but, except in the case of migrating dohl, this is genetically irrelevant, the exception of course being the much further-flying ahlda, who are not nest-bound. Now, we can probably assume that to a terrestrially bound population of ahlda, the best land quite quickly becomes colonised, and young Queens have to make quite long journeys to find new nest sites. I don’t know whether they’re assisted or left alone when they do this, maybe there’s some cultural taboo against attacking travelling Queens, or whether it’s a dangerous trek through enemy territory, but either way the result is the same; they probably settle quite far from their mothers and sisters, and when nests collapse and die out or become abandoned, new Queens colonising that territory are likely come some distance away. This means that our population of reproductive queens is genetically diverse with respect to their spatial distribution. Of course, it’s possible that incest is genetically irrelevant for aljik, but that’s unlikely so out of caution let’s assume that it isn’t – ”

“Wait,” I said. “How can it be irrelevant?”

“Oh, there are lots of theoretical ways. If the aljik are haploid, for example, and not diploid like us, then close genetics between the parents don’t mean much except in the sense that you’d get somewhat of a monoculture, which isn’t ideal for disease and disaster but generally probably not a huge problem, though genetic diversity would still be greatly desirable where possible in that circumstance. Or it’s possible that Queens and dohl contribute entirely different parts of whatever aljik have for a ‘genetic code’, or possibly entirely different sorts of reproductive information altogether. There’s a lot of ways for it not to matter, but none of them are as stable and versatile as something like out method. Either way, it’s probably something that the dohl can clear up for us fairly easily; if it’s a problem, it will absolutely be culturally forbidden since the negative consequences would be very obvious in a species that reproduces like this, and they’ll know about it. I’m leaning towards it being a problem, because there’s far less impetus for the ahlda to even evolve if it isn’t.

“Anyway, assuming it is a problem, the Empire’s problems are a lot worse, although still very much present if it isn’t. The ahlda can fly about freely between nests that are reasonably close together on a planet. The moment you put them on a spaceship, you’ve got bad news. There’s a world of difference between asking a flighty, independent being who everyone seems to agree isn’t all that smart from travelling from nest to nest to live on the kindness of interesting strangers, and asking them to make travel plans through space to specific locations without any pheremone trails or whatever they usually use. I don’t have a way to verify this right now, but I would not be surprised one single bit if the aljik faced a similar crisis to this after discovering spaceflight and it was never resolved. It’s possible that the higher rate of ahlda migration that they’re trying to return to is itself a very low rate that became the new stable rate post space colonisation, and history has forgotten the previous rate. The lack of trade and extremely limited interactions between nests are probably why inter-nest history knowledge seems to be very sparse. Or maybe that’s just because my knowledge base cones from interviewing random pirates and patrolmen over a couple of hours.

“Anyway: nests spread across space are already a problem for ‘cross-pollination’ via ahlda. But Empires? Empires jack that up to a thousand. Here’s a fun question: how do you think the empires bordering the Out-Western Aljik Empire came to be? We know that Queen Anta’s plan was revolutionary to the aljik, that this isn’t something that occurs to them naturally without a lot at stake and without a great big helping hand like the Venusian brain implants teaching them that, oh hey, you can actually talk to other species. We also know that they don’t seem to share a lot of information across borders. So how would other Empires arise?”

I thought about it. “They’d probably learn about it from Anta and her descendants, same as Tatik did. Reproduce the conditions at home.”

“Exactly! The neighbouring Queens are Tatik’s cousins and second cousins. Putting this, the original Empire, smack bang in the middle of an enormous genetic dead zone. They’re asking ahlda to migrate at leas the distance of one Empire, and assuming that genetic variability matters, across the distance of multiple Empires, in order to reach the heart planet and lay some eggs. Ahlda born to Tatik have to make the same journey in the opposite direction. Most of them aren’t making it because it’s too far. Maybe their bodies can’t take it, maybe it’s hard to find or be attracted to other nests that you can’t see or hear about or smell or whatever, maybe the ahlda are getting waylaid by something on their long journey that, to them, is more interesting. Either way, the root cause is the same. The only ones making it through are the handful who didn’t encounter problems and, because they’re not hugely social with each other, have no idea why their sisters did.”

“Huh. Well, then. What can we do about it?”

“That’s the tricky part. I have absolutely no idea.”

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