The Eyzakers are an insectoid race. Only the queens among them are sentient: they rule the hives, each of which is a large Eyzaker city with a population of hundreds of thousands, even millions.
The queens themselves differ little in appearance from other Eyzakers — that is how evolution shaped them. The rest are divided into several classes: warriors, workers and herders. The herders keep livestock, which is the foundation of the Eyzaker food chain.
An important feature of the race is that the larger the hive a queen controls, the cleverer she is. The other Eyzakers are part of her neural network, and so large hives are capable of great technological progress.
The Great Conglomerate of Hives, one of the largest Eyzaker states, is a match for the lands of the Golden Suns in its level of technology.
The Eyzakers are counted among the most developed insectoid races, alongside the Sengi, the Raveis and the Erozy. Like the Erozy and the Raveis, they favour hive cities: enormous structures in which millions may live.
Such a city fuses residential and factory architecture: towers with chimneys, a power station, a spaceport with a landing pad, workshops interleaved with living tiers. Roads run out towards neighbouring hives, and communication channels are strung between the structures. A hive housing some hundred thousand is reckoned a small one.
The hive feeds other races too. The Mukhs and the Khaitra live on its outer face, doing external work and repairing the structures. The Zitsry service the deep communications, spending their whole lives in complete darkness. And the Insvamy parasitise somewhere outside the hives, falling on those who stray too far.
In Eyzaker and Eroz sectors the most important currency is food, and it is valued differently according to its calorie content.
There is a common currency as well — the bushel. Its rate differs from planet to planet, but it is invariably pegged to a single bushel of grain.
An Eyzaker is an ochre creature on thin limbs, with a long neck and several eyes set in an elongated head. The queens look almost no different from the rest: nothing in the body betrays which one is the hive's only mind.