Nameless
From Shifti
 |
This story is a work in progress. |
 |
Xanadu story universe |
???
I set out an array of paper plates and pick up the jar of honey, which someone, likely Emma, has kindly loosened the cap of. This is the first time I’ve done this alone, but Emma didn’t even need to touch anything the last time. I can do this. I'm so much more coordinated now.
The loose ones rise, interested by the smell, and I make them stay back as I set the jar down and take up the spoon. It’s easy enough to force my fingers around the handle, harder to grip it enough to take its weight, much less make it move through thick honey. They don’t like it. It doesn’t come naturally to them. But it’s easier and easier to push past what they don't like doing, these days.
In a series of jerky motions, I spoon out dollops of honey into each plate. It pours in hillocks and spreads slowly. I’m making a mess. The honey is thick enough that strings of it trail behind the spoon and end up on me, on the table, on the sides of the jar. Emma will have to get that; I'm not up to using damp cloths yet. I force them to wait. Wait as I finish, wait as I move several plates down to the floor, wait as I set the spoon on another plate, wait as I pick up the open container of pollen and dump out a measure of it and set it down, wait as I settle on the chair. They all but vibrate with impatience, I feel the anticipation, but I make them wait, just for a moment, savoring my control.
Go. They rise, and I release the ones on their chains, and they fly about for a few moments as my skeleton sags limply, hardly any of them clinging to it or climbing about inside. Free of it, I fill the whole room in a thick cloud of them, their wings probably deafening to human ears. I focus on the honey on the plates, and they land. This time I make sure that none land in the honey and get stuck. Instead they cluster around, mostly on the plates, climbing over each other and packed side by side, lapping it with several thousand tiny red tongue-like proboscises.
If I could sigh still, I would have. Clover honey. It’s not bad – I did get grade A genuine relatively fresh honey, there will be no more repeats of when they gave me “honey-flavored syrup” – but it’s always so sweet and bland. It won’t be hard to get a different kind of honey, eucalyptus or buckwheat or maybe honeydew. I have to eat it, if I don’t want to send them out to collect flower nectar or feed them juice, in which case I’d have to handle the concentration process and end up back where I’d started.
Honey comes in different types, true, but … but they’re all honey. All sweet, thick, sticky, sent down several million tiny throats into several million honey stomachs, to come up and be added to my storage organ later, and later yet extracted and combined with pollen and consumed again on an individual basis. There’s not that much variation in a bee diet. I taste honey all the time.
Sausages. Sausages with sweet mustard, none of this spicy abomination. Could I eat them, if I got a blender and ground them really fine? They do have mandibles, not just tongues. Maybe potatoes? Oh, potatoes… what I wouldn’t do for just one hash brown with applesauce. I’d probably get terrible indigestion, but if I could eat it at all, even if it had to come back up, it would be worth it.
Some of the faster ones have finished, picked up some pollen, and are sluggishly flying back to my skeleton to deposit everything. Bees probably sound absolutely disgusting, all this going out and vomiting and going out again, and if it’s too high in water there’s more swallowing and vomiting of the same stuff and then it’s left out to dry. It’s a communal resource thing, though, and besides, the honey stomach is separate from the digestive one. By now I only really notice it because of the everpresent taste.
This is the part I dislike most. The honey taste is still overpowering, most of them are feeding, most of the rest are regurgitating, and so I don’t have nearly enough to form around my skeleton and make it move. I don’t like leaving my skeleton out. It still gives me a little shock to see it, with those staring eye sockets and amber-stained bones. It’s not like I need a reminder of what’s happened. Besides, I keep my queen, all of my larvae and pupae, and my honey reserve in it. Can’t leave them unprotected.
The good thing about feeding like this is that it’s efficient. I get all the gathering out of the way at once, and all the storing. No this-way-to-food waggle dances or sudden panic as I realize I’m getting low on something. The bad thing is that it takes a good forty minutes between setting up and finishing. This is probably less time than I spent eating when I was human, but it's forty minutes when I am absolutely useless.
Maybe I will ask Emma about getting a radio in here. It would have to be a very particular kind, since I’m not up to pushing buttons yet. There's a surprising amount of force behind using buttons or keys or dials, and a great deal of precision. One day I might be able to do anything I used to be able to do, or nearly - I doubt I will ever swim or shower again - but for now, large spoons and walking are impressive enough achievements.
The queen wants to lay an egg in the queen cup the workers made. I let her do this, but I will need to make sure that when the egg hatches, the workers don't feed her enough royal jelly to make her into another queen. The one I have is still healthy, with plenty of remaining spermatheca. Supersedure is months or years away, especially at the slow rate of laying that I allow. If I do let another queen form, the virgin queen will fly out to mate with drones. I've kept them from raising larvae that will turn into drones because the males are useless except for mating, and there's little enough space for worker cells. Assuming that the virgin queen finds and mates with drones of some other species, she'll come back and either kill my old queen and take over, or one of them will leave with half of the hive. I have no idea what would happen then, but my attention is divided enough with one hive.
I'm not the queen. The queen lays eggs and creates pheremones that keep the workers from flooding cells with royal jelly and raising replacement queens. That's about it. I do much more.
I'm the hivemind. Technically I suppose I should think of myself as "we", but it's like how just about everyone is a collection of atoms, a multitude of cooperating cells, yet they call themselves individuals. Millions of bees make me up, nearly two hundred pounds of them, but I am one, not many. They aren't bright enough to realize that most hives don't have a central mind. Sometimes they resist what I want them to do, but they don't argue. I get things done more efficiently than the hive would without me - my senses are better than theirs individually, and I can make decisions that are far beyond them.
I don't remember who I was before. Just that I was human once; I remember what skin felt like, sweat, ears. I remember having a keen sense of hearing and eyes that could see crisp edges and what was happening a mile away. I remember fingernails. Lips. Hair. The taste of foods other than honey. I don't remember what red looked like, or if ultraviolet seemed like a strange color at first.
I remember those first moments after the event, collapsing as my muscles all dissolved into flying insects, taking off in a panicked swarm that got split up into half a dozen confused groups, all taking off in different directions. I didn't really notice anything else going on. You try having your body turn into a colony of anything and see what happens to your observation skills in the immediate aftermath. Somehow two or three groups got outside, found each other, huddled in a mass on a tree branch, and eventually I stopped being scared out of my mind and was able to - hah - pull myself together, tracking down the other groups.
By then everything else had settled down, and I found that while my hearing is terrible, apparently I'm telepathic. Or the bees are, which amounts to the same thing in the end. It maps to hearing and it's not very strong telepathy - I pick up on what people near me are saying or just barely keeping themselves from saying, not their inner thoughts - but I have no trouble understanding anyone, and around me, whispering might as well be normal speech. Similarly, others can hear me when I make the effort. Which is good. The queen can pipe and will do it if I want her to, but I have no idea how that quacking/squeaking sound could be turned into speech.
There are a few places on the Internet which mention a room full of bees talking. Yes, that was me.
This is why I don't like feeding. Unless I micromanage them, there is nothing for me to do and they can't work while feeding, so I get lost in my own thoughts. I will definitely request a radio. If there isn't some special version to use, I can ask Emma. I don't like depending on her so completely. But it's a temporary measure.
I sense a presence outside of this room just before there is a knock on the door, and they are startled into the air. I urge them back to feeding and ask.
Coherent "speech" is always an effort. It's actually better not to think about how I do it. [I'm feeding.]
"I'm sorry." It's Emma. They hear her voice, but it's fuzzy and deep. It's strange thinking of how I really 'hear' her as telepathy. "Doctor Quest - I mean, Doctor Sands sent a messenger down. He says he'll be in the office in fifteen minutes with something you'll want to see."
I take a moment to measure how much progress they've been making. [That gives me enough time to finish here. Emma... can you pick up after me? I think I could manage today, but...]
"With the appointment, you won't have time. I understand." I sense her walking away.
Some of them start getting distracted and crawling off. I make them return. The work ethic of bees isn't quite what people think, or maybe it's only my strain. They look something like honeybees, yes, with brown or black wings instead of clear. But they aren't, not really. An entomologist took a look at one and said that they didn't fit into any species. They might not even be bees, just insects evolved to look like them and do most of what they do, and a few other things. Like have telepathic connections letting them support a hive mind. They're also much stronger than bees, stronger than ants even, and can survive much more physical stress.
What does Sands want with me, anyway? But I have to wait. If I don't finish feeding in one session, I have to return for a second. I hate those. They become so restless.
