Book 7. Chapter 26: The new boss
“Intelligent birds? My, you’ve gone a little daft now.” To’Sefit shrugged, her animated image shaking her head with disappointment. “If they can’t understand your name, I see no reason to speak to them at all.”
No reason to talk to them? His instincts told him this was the way. Humans didn’t care for bugs, only the strange and broken ones were fascinated enough to collect them. The same with Feathers, they shouldn’t care for humans or intelligent creatures, with exception to the strange and broken Feathers. Like To’Wrathh.
“Are you going to stop by and talk to every little ant you see in your way? Rather disgusting to even think about.” To’Sefit said, equally coming to the same conclusion he had. “To’Orda, my busy little bee, they aren’t even humans and those monkeys are already barely worth our attention. Intelligent species are… what’s the human term for this? A speck of pyrite per dozen? Bed bugs in a free mattress? Something like that.”
He considered the logic here. “Nnn… Ignore them?”
“Or kill them if they get in your way.” Another image of her shrugging returned, examining her nails with indifference. “I fail to see why this is even a question. They can’t understand our name, it should be obvious they aren’t worthy of anything else.”
They weren’t worthy of speaking to him. That made sense. He felt it was right. His instincts agreed, as did his gut.
But in Mother’s fury, he had been bound to answer any question he was given.
And he had been asked who he was. He couldn’t ignore the creatures, he needed to answer.
His internal programming warred with each other, between the primal need to simply consider them unworthy of his attention, mother’s direct brand on his very soul to answer any question given, and the other primal need to do as little work as possible.