He understood fazzing, the ability to detect the presence of moving objects by sensing the disruption of air. But the concept of smell utterly eluded him, much as color did. Along with arms and legs, then, he desperately wished for antennae. He desperately wished to be complete.

The Nurses were patient, fully understanding such yearnings. Antennae and limbs would come with time. Meanwhile there was much to learn.

They taught speech, though larvae were capable of no more than a crude wheezing and gasping through their flexible mouth-parts. It took hard mandibles and adult lungs and throats to produce the elegant clicks and whistles of mature communication.

So, he could see after a fashion, and hear, and speak a little. But sight was incomplete without color and he could not faz or smell at all. By way of compensation the teachers explained that no adult could faz or smell nearly as well as the primitive ancestors of the Thranx, back when the race dwelt in unintelligence even deeper in the bowels of the earth than they did now, when artificial light did not exist, and the senses of faz and smell necessarily exceeded that of sight in importance.

He listened and understood, but that did not lessen the frustration. He would worm his way around the exercise course because they insisted he needed exercise, but he was ever conscious of what a pale shadow of true mobility it was. Oh, so frustrating!

Larval years were the Learning Time. Hardly able to move, unable to smell or faz, barely able to converse, but with decent sight and hearing a larva was adequately equipped for learning.

He was a particularly voracious student, absorbing everything and asking greedily for more. His teachers and Nurses were pleased, as was the teaching machine attached to his cradle. He mastered High and Low Thranx, although he could properly speak neither. He learned physics and chemistry and basic biology, including the danger posed by any body of water deeper than the thorax, where the adult’s breathing spicules were located. An adult Thranx could float, but not forever, and when the water entered the body, it sank. Swimming was a talent reserved for primitive creatures with internal skeletons.

He was taught astronomy and geology although he’d never seen the sky or the earth, for all that he lived beneath the surface. The Nursery was exquisitely tiled and paneled. Other sections of Paszex, his home town, were lined with plastics, ceramics, metals, or stonework. In the ancient burrows on the planet Hivehom, where the Thranx had evolved, were tunnels and chambers lined with regurgitated cellulose and body plaster.

Industry and agriculture were studied. History told how the social arthropods known as the Thranx first mastered Hivehom, adapting to existence above as well as below the surface, and then spread to other worlds. Eventually theology was discussed and the larvae made their choices.

Then on to more complex subjects as the mind matured, to biochemistry, nucleonics, sociology and psychology and the arts, including jurisprudence. He particularly enjoyed the history of space travel, the stories of the first hesitant flights to the three moons of Hivehom in clumsy rockets, the development of the posigravity drive that pushed ships through the gulf between the stars, and the establishment of colonies on worlds like Dixx and Everon and Calm Nursery. He learned of the burgeoning commerce between Willo-wane, his own colony world, and Hivehom and the other colonies.