"Luud is king. He is larger and more gorgeously marked; but otherwise he and I are identical, and why not? Did not Luud produce the egg from which I hatched?"
"What?" queried the girl; "I do not understand you."
"Yes," explained Ghek, "all of us are from Luud's eggs, just as all the swarm of Moak are from Moak's eggs."
"Oh!" exclaimed Tara of Helium understandingly; "you mean that Luud has many wives and that you are the offspring of one of them."
"No, not that at all," replied Ghek. "Luud has no wife. He lays the eggs himself. You do not understand."
Tara of Helium admitted that she did not.
"I will try to explain, then," said Ghek, "if you will promise to sing to me later."
"I promise," she said.
"We are not like the rykors," he began. "They are creatures of a low order, like yourself and the banths and such things. We have no sex—not one of us except our king, who is bi-sexual. He produces many eggs from which we, the workers and the warriors, are hatched; and one in every thousand eggs is another king egg, from which a king is hatched. Did you notice the sealed openings in the room where you saw Luud? Sealed in each of those is another king. If one of them escaped
