How he wanted to go to Hivehom when he learned of it! The mother world of the people, Hivehom. Magical, enchanting name. His Nurses smiled at his excitement. It was only natural he should want to travel there. Everyone did.

Yet something more showed on his profile charts, an undefined yearning that puzzled the larval psychologists. Possibly it was related to his unusual hatching. The normal four eggs had bequeathed not male and female pairs but three females and this one male.

He was aware of the psychologists’ concerns but didn’t worry about them. He concentrated on learning as much as possible, stuffing his mind full to bursting with the wonders of existence. While these strange adults mumbled about “indecisiveness” and “unwillingness to tend toward a course of action,” he plowed through the learning programs, mitigating their worries with his extraordinary appetite for knowledge.

Couldn’t they understand that he wasn’t interested in any one particular subject? He was interested in everything. But the psychologists didn’t understand, and they fretted. So, did his family, because a Thranx on the Verge always knows what he or she intends to do … after. Generalizations do not a life make.

For a while they thought he might want to be a philosopher, but his general interests were of specifics and not of abstruse speculations. Only his unusually high scores prevented their moving him from the general Nursery to one reserved for the mentally deficient.

On and on he studied, learning that Willow-wane was a wonderful world of comfortable swamps and lowlands, of heat and humidity much like that of thes Nursery. A true garden world whose poles were free of ice and whose large continents were heavily jungled. Willow-wane was even more accommodating than Hivehom itself. He was fortunate to have been born there.

His name he knew from early on. He was Ryo, of the Family Zen, of the Clan Zu, of the Hive Zex. The last was a holdover from primitive times, for only towns and cities existed now, no more true hives.

More history, the information that the development of real intelligence was concurrent with the development of egg-laying ability in all Thranx females. Gone was the need for a specialized Queen. Their newly evolved biological flexibility gave the Thranx a natural advantage over other arthropods. But Thranx still paid respects to an honorary clanmother and hivemother, echoes of the biological matriarchy that once dominated the race. That was tradition. The people had a great love of tradition.

He remembered his shock when he’d first learned of the AAnn, a space-going race of intelligence, calculation, cunning, and aggressiveness. The shock arose not from their abilities but from the fact that the creatures possessed internal skeletons, leathery skins, and flexible bodies. They moved like the primitive animals of the jungles but their intelligence was undeniable. The discovery had caused consternation in the Thranx scientific community, which had postulated that no creature lacking a protective exoskeleton could survive long enough to evolve true intelligence. The hard scales of the AAnn gave protection, and some felt that their closed circulatory systems compensated for the lack of an exoskeleton.