The Race Where Children are Fathered by the Tribe

The key to the understanding of this race is, I believe, its strange method of reproduction, which was essentially communal. Every individual was capable of budding a new individual; but only at certain seasons, and only after stimulation by a kind of pollen emanating from the whole tribe and carried on the air. The grains of this ultra-microscopically fine pollen dust were not germ cells but "genes," the elementary factors of inheritance. The precincts of the tribe were at all times faintly ...

 Scent as Data in a Beehive

To shield her antennae from the many bruising signals in the air, she walked with her head low. Air currents and electrical pulses from thousands of bees rippled against her, but Flora ignored them all. The pulsing track alone held her focus, clear and simple across the perilously busy lobby, where she had to slow down because of the tempest of data underfoot. A rush of workers came through in a tumult of scent and Flora lifted her head—then the rhythm of the foot-current drew her on. She ...