“Slogan two: Ignorance is strength. Regina understood systems. And she wanted the Order’s system, the whole, to dominate over the parts. She didn’t want some charismatic fool taking over and ruining everything in the pursuit of some foolish dream. So she ordered that everybody should know as little as possible, and should follow the people close to them. The Order drones are agents who work locally, with only local knowledge, and no insight into the bigger picture.

“Three: Listen to your sisters. That slogan encourages feedback. Inside the Crypt there’s a relentless pressure to conform. You told me you felt it, when you were in the Crypt, the endless social weight. Poor Lucia, who wouldn’t conform, suffered exclusion. The social pressure is a homeostasis—like the temperature regulator of an air-conditioning system, a negative feedback that keeps everybody in their place.”

“It was all just looks,” I said uncomfortably. “Nothing was said.”

He fixed nonexistent glasses, intense, determined, anxious. “You think when you were in the Crypt people communicated with you just with speech?” Again he tapped at his handheld, seeking the right reference. “George, we have many channels of communication. Look at this.” He pushed the handheld at me; its tiny screen showed a dense technical paper. “We have a paralanguage—vocal stuff but nonverbal, groans and laughs and sighs, and body posture, touch, motion—going on in parallel to everything we say. The anthropologists have identified hundreds of these signals—more than the chimps, more than the monkeys. Even without speech, we would have a richer way to communicate even than the chimps, and they manage to run pretty complex societies. And all this is going on under the surface of our spoken interaction.” He was staring at me now. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you didn’t feel a pressure from the way people in there behaved toward you, regardless of what they actually said.”

I imagined those circles of pale, disapproving faces. I shook my head to dispel the vision.

Peter said, “And then there are other ways to communicate. Touch, even scent . . . The smells, all that kissing you describe. Tasting each other, you said.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? George, weaver ants communicate with pheromones. And chemical communication is a very old system. Single-celled creatures have to rely on simple chemical messages to tell them about their environment, because only multicelled creatures—like ants, like humans—are complex enough to organize clusters of cells into eyes and ears . . . I admit I’m speculating about this.

“But, George, put it all together and you’ve got a classic recipe for an emergent system: local decision making by ignorant agents responding to local stimuli, and powerful feedback mechanisms. And then you have a genetic mandate for eusociality. All in those three slogans.”

“All right. And then what happened? How did we get from there to here—from Regina to Lucia?”