“Exactly, Member Speaker,” Heloïse continued. “The Cousins are our feminine. They’re where the people who felt drawn to feminine concepts gathered in the wake of the Great Renunciation. That’s the heart of the Hive, but the words are taboo so no one dares admit it, and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it’s teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word ‘Empire’ and Gordian if we banned the word ‘psyche.’ How could the CFB’s computer sorting figure out what the Hive really wants when the words we need to express it are forbidden? Motherly affection, sisterly devotion, uxorial duty, filial piety. Those concepts are the real heart of the Cousins, and we need them now more than ever, with violence and talk of war looming before us. To let the Cousins be themselves we have to undo the silence of the Church War and accept the fact that gendered thoughts are still in us, not innately, but because our ancestors chopped down the tree without killing the roots, so new shoots have sprung up. Gender has changed since three hundred years ago, having less to do with sex and bodies, but it still affects our thoughts. We teach it unconsciously, just as our ancestors did, in stereotypes, associations, pre-modern stories, subtle differences in how we treat children we see as ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ We can’t stop passing it on, or even study how we pass it on, when we won’t admit that it’s happening. We stopped the conversation too quickly. After the shock of the Church War, the survivors declared that equality and feminism had won when we had only slapped a patch over the surface. We need to admit that gendered concepts are still affecting how we think, and let the Cousins voice them, now. Think of the Set-Set Riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn’t even be discussed!

“Now violence is threatening again. If we lose the Cousins, Earth’s last humane, feminine, temperate voice will die, and we will have nothing left to intercede when other forces quarrel. Tribune Jehovah Mason understands this. He and I were raised with masculine and feminine. We had it in our minds when we drafted this interim constitution, assigning extra representatives to humanitarian groups, teachers, doctors, daycare workers, office managers, grandbash’parents, new parents, veterinarians, therapists, all the voices of nurturing that have always been the core of the Cousins. Trust us! Call for the Cousins to elect an Interim Assembly that will finally actually reflect the values that have always defined the Hive. Then, when the Cousins are remade, a revised form of the CFB can be a part of—”

Who would dare interrupt her righteous tirade? Only God, or rather His works, manifest in the mingled screams of men and women which burst in through the doors and windows in a universal shell of human grief. Order collapsed like sand castles before a flood. The agenda, Kosala’s announcement, even the rebuttals that had built up like battle-hungry legions during Heloïse’s speech, all were swept clean away as the reporters watching from the balcony, one eye on their newsfeed lenses, screamed: