: The Queen, obsessed with the nature of chaos and how it may be avoided, saw
: the Un'Pfhor living in the anarchy of the fallen world and decided to put
: them out of their misery. The Un'Phfor and all they represented had to be
: purged in order to ensure the new race/proto-empire would not be tainted
: with the memes or genes of the old order. Up to this point, She had no
: experience with assimilation and could not risk botching it and failing,
: such would have been disasterous to the fledging empire. She succeeds so
: well in this repsect that eventually all known history of the Un'Pfhor is
: hers alone, and as her mind goes it becomes lost forever.
You know, I'm not totally sold on your idea for the development of the Pfhor queen - it's easier (perhaps incorrectly) to draw parallels to earth-like insects with a genetically programmed hierarchy with a single queen that lives for a defined time, dies and is then replaced - but your conjecture raises an interesting possibility. The Pfhor were doomed to extinction from the start! The reasons for this are obvious. The queen has utterly destroyed the old un'Pfhor society in which natural procreation occured and replaced it with an ordered society of genetically altered clones. She alone has knowledge of the old society and she is going senile. Even if humanity and Durandal had never come along, the queen was destined ultimately to go senile and die. And then what - it was her direction that guided the expansion of the Pfhor empire. With her passing, there would be no direction and the ordered society she so desperately tried to build would ultimately sink into chaos. With no alternative to the ordered society she built and no chosen successor (and probably no Pfhor with the mental facilities to be her successor), chaos would have ensued, reproduction might have ceased altogether and the Pfhor would have become extinct. The only alternative I can see is that in the absense of human intervention, as her senility became more apparent, the High Councel would have developed a plan to create a replacement.
