We already know the fate of meat and dairy products.
The main sources of nourishment for Americans for the time being are corn, wheat, potatoes and rice. Poultry is holding steady, but there’s a shortage of feed for them as well.
There has been such an unprecedented strain on fisheries off the coast of North America that the rest of the world has had to enact sanctions. The newsreader says that the tough food situation in the USA makes the sanctions possible, because if South America, Asia and Europe cut off their supplies of meat, fruits and vegetables, it would leave the USA in a worse jam than it’s already in.
The focus is on food. The cotton harvest isn’t mentioned. But it is also suffering from a lack of pollinators.
The newscaster doesn’t mention whether anyone misses their honey.
*
I take Eero’s urn.
I bring it to the Other Side, to the shore of Hopevale Lake.
I don’t even bury it.
There it sits – grey, beautiful, shapely. It will decompose when its time comes.
The rain and wind will dissolve it.
But some day, maybe today, Eero will come out of the woods, listening to the air like an animal and walk around it like an insect around a sweet flower.
Out of curiosity he’ll lift the lid and sniff at it, and maybe he’ll remember. My house of clay, he may say to himself if he still speaks – in the language that once united us.
How wonderful the smell of immortality is.
He’s one of them now.
He’s taken wing.
*
As I look at the sunlit urn I know that there must be a rational explanation for all of this. Just as electricity was once a cheap magic trick done with catskin and amber and now it’s an untiring servant in every house. We just don’t have all the facts yet.
Evolution, that blind watchmaker, doesn’t set species in motion one by one. When conditions change for one species, and it assures its own survival through natural selection, the same process, half by accident, sends other species in a certain direction. If an animal grows a long warm coat suddenly there is a tempting new ecological niche for parasites. Promoting our own survival may inadvertently open a door that benefits another species.
There are varieties of fungus that grow only in the foundations of houses. Sparrows at one time moved into the cities to feed on horse manure, and rats and pigeons wouldn’t be such common everyday companions to humans if humans hadn’t opened the door for them as well, a door to new worlds with more food, more ways to live than they could ever have imagined in their meagre existence in the wild.
These kinds of mutual mutations might even have been a necessity of symbiosis, a bit like a dog’s ability to read human behaviour. When species start to live together they even start to share pathogens such as influenza passed from birds and pigs to humans.
Could the abilities that bees have acquired also spread to humans and produce some sort of … broadening of our world of perception? Some ability that, under precisely the right conditions, a human would also have?
It might not be a good thing for bees, but maybe they have worlds to spare.
*
I go back to the opening slowly, dawdling, perhaps hoping for some sign from Eero. But I don’t want to rush it. He can make the first move himself – if he wants to, when he wants to. I can wait.
The ladder rises at a slant into the air, leaning against nothing. It looks utterly ordinary and completely surreal at the same time, like a cleverly manipulated photograph. May you build a ladder to the stars …
But this ladder leads away from the stars back to the dull, grey, noisy world, the smell of blood and exhaust.
The wasteland.
Those who are faster and wiser have already made their choice. The bees.
They’ve gone quiet now. Night will be here soon.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
ENTERPRISE PROTECTION
My blog has received a whole lot of comments about the Enterprise Protection Act.
This is very new legislation, and I assume that many of the comments mentioning it come from among the ranks of the Finland First faction of the True Finns, the Centre Party or related groups.
This law came up for consideration very quickly because there have been a large number of not just physical but also informational attacks on factory farms. Until now there was no ‘real’ legal means of preventing such attacks. Freeing fur animals, for instance, was at worst ‘obstruction of economic activity’ or ‘disturbing the peace’. The new Enterprise Protection Act that some of our own commenters have lobbied for would mean that any sort of legal activity that ‘obstructs a law-abiding enterprise’ would be a punishable offence subject to large fines. The interesting thing about this new law of theirs is that it includes a clause that, depending on how it is interpreted, could conflict with laws protecting freedom of speech. The clause says that ‘if someone purposely attempts to distribute in the media incorrect or unconfirmed information that could hamper or be detrimental to the operator of an enterprise in a given field or portray such a person’s product in an unfavourable light …’ It has been cleverly compared with the laws against premeditated attacks on people of specific ethnic or other defined groups.
In summary: ‘preventing or obstructing someone from operating an enterprise of national importance without legal justification’ is a crime. It would make the activities of the ARA illegal because many of the posts on this blog would be categorized as ‘public incitement to criminality’.
Let’s do a bit of comparison. If there were still a significant mobile-phone industry in Finland, as there was a decade ago, this law would have forbidden the mention of any ‘unconfirmed’ connection between brain tumours and mobile phones. A racist comment such as ‘Somalis are all criminals’ is wrong and sweeping and harmful to a group of people. But saying that ‘mobile phones cause brain tumours’, although it may not be backed up by research that everyone (by which I mean, of course, everyone including mobile-phone manufacturers) accepts, may soon also be an act of criminality.
Which means that when I say that ‘animals are treated in a horrible, relentless, extremely cruel and uncaring way on factory farms and feed-lots’ or tell you that ‘the methane emissions of cows and pigs significantly increase global warming’ or that ‘eating meat is bad for your health’ I’m obviously hampering somebody’s enterprise. I actually suspect that there has long been a sort of code of silence for these same reasons of ‘protecting enterprise’. There has been a lot less talk, for instance, about how Finland’s agricultural fertilizers have polluted the Baltic Sea.
Since I’m sure we’ll have to deal with Finland First and Pro Good Life for the foreseeable future I respectfully request that our ideologue friends give themselves a catchier nickname. Proggle just doesn’t stir the passions.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 126)
USER NAME: Tirsu
How about Proctol? Since they’re all arseholes.
USER NAME: Wellbe
: - DDDDD
USER NAME: Laiplip
Famous for their moral rectaltude.
USER NAME: JesseP
Fartland First.
USER NAME: Tirsu
LOL! And it has the methane connection!
USER NAME: Wiljo
Fartland First. How about an anagram of that? Rant Lid Sniff. Darn Finn Flits.
MODERATOR: E.H.
Hmm. ‘Why don’t you go home and gnaw on a dead animal, you Darn Finn Flits!’ It could work.
USER NAME: Some shred of decency
This kind of slanderous obscenity and discrimination based on a person’s ideology will thankfully soon be over. It’s incomprehensible to me that a representative can be democratically elected to a parliamentary coalition fighting for the freedom to operate an enterprise without harassment and hen be the victim of this kind of organized wi
tch-hunt and outpouring of negative attacks. A Finland First attorney will be getting in touch with your internet provider.
USER NAME: Tirsu
Did he say that hens are being attacked? Aren’t they the ones attacking the hens?
USER NAME: JesseP
Bwahaha! Best one today! Learn to write, man.
SHOW ALL 114 COMMENTS
DAY SIXTEEN
I hesitate as I climb the ladder. I don’t want to go back. I check to make sure the queen is still in the bag around my neck. I weigh it in my hand for a moment.
What a wonderful creature.
So powerful compared with us.
Pupa used to say that a bee can hear the flowers talking and even see the ghosts of plants.
When I grew up and researched the matter myself I learned that what he said was true. Bees can sense light and colour in a much broader spectrum than we can. Their eyes don’t just receive and interpret colours, light conditions and the position of the sun they also have hairs that sense the strength and direction of the wind. They contain a compass and gyroscope as well as a GPS locator and radar to detect food sources. Their compound eyes are made up of thousands of component eyes with which they sense structures in their environment from optic currents and then use the data received to measure the exact distance of nectar-bearing plants from the hive.
And bees don’t rely solely on their amazing visual acuity; their antennae are constantly sensing the world of fragrance. Each antenna functions independently so that the bee can perceive scents in three dimensions; they smell in stereo.
Bees can sense electrical charges in the air and feel magnetic fields.
It’s pretty obvious that if there are such things as portals, doors, thin places between parallel worlds bees are perhaps better equipped to find them than any other creature.
They’ve probably found myriad gateways over many millennia, endless untouched worlds, and colonized them without humans.
Their own Elysian Fields where angels’ blood is never shed. Immortal, forever young.
There’s more to these little winged creatures than meets the eye.
*
The darkness grows thicker and I wait for the stars, holding my breath. I believe that even at its darkest the night on the Other Side isn’t impenetrably black, its darkness never as thick as sludge. I can imagine that even on the most moonless, starless winter night the black of the sky must be transparent, stealthily see-through, so that you sense the flaming heat of a hidden summer beyond it.
A spotless sky.
Euripides’ paradise. Euripides.
Whose slave shall I become in my old age? In what far clime? A poor old drone, the wretched copy of a corpse, set to keep the gate …
The idea suddenly hits me, rational, obvious, airtight.
Why sit keeping the gate, a drone awaiting autumn slaughter – even in a beehive the drones, those happy summer gigolos, are useless when winter comes, have their food rations taken away so they won’t be a burden on the colony over the winter.
I could stay here.
Live here.
I could gather mushrooms and berries, dig some kind of cellar. Maybe plant a vegetable garden. Build a little cabin maybe, a bit at a time. No need to hurry. I could fish in Hopevale Lake, which must have fish in it in this world. I could pick a hell of a lot of dates. I could dry them. And there are olives.
Now and then I could steal some honey from wild bees’ nests, asking for pardon.
I could sit at a fire and gaze at the ancient starry sky, the only person here.
Or not the only one. Maybe some beautiful evening I would hear a rustling in the woods, and into the circle of firelight would step a familiar form, smiling shyly, and without a word I would make room for him on my sitting log. Eero. I would offer him some fish roasted on the fire. I would hand him a brick of dates. We could talk in quiet voices. Get to know each other.
*
Maybe humanity has come to this earth, to our own familiar universe, through a portal made by the bees. Maybe they followed the bees like sharks following a boat, following a trail of crumbs dropped from above.
Red rises to my cheeks as I realize what I’m planning to do with my own little nest of civilization. To build, mould, bring domesticated plants, manipulate the environment as much as I can, because otherwise I can’t survive here on the Other Side.
But what if I do it quite carefully?
Only Eero and I would know.
The secret would die with me.
I could do it.
I have to do it.
And I could always go back. I could take good care of the queen bee. I could just go up the ladder again with the queen around my neck to fetch something I’ve run out of or forgotten to bring. Go back in cold times to winter over in the cottage like a bee in its nest and watch how the world is getting on, if it’s still around.
I would have two worlds at my disposal. The thought is inexpressibly reassuring and bright.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
AN INTERESTING LINK
This link will take you to some very sad but quite revealing video material from Finland First representative (and no defender of hens) Rauno Viitaluoma’s poultry farm. In light of the fact that the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry is a member of Viitaluoma’s party, it’s amazing to see the unlawful things Viitaluoma is up to at his concentration camp. Fix your eyes on the sick and dying animals, the injured feet and wings, the aggressive behaviour induced by the crowded conditions. His chickens are bound to be tender, what with the way they’ve tenderized each other with their beaks.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 87)
USER NAME: Rauno Viitaluoma’s attorney
This is to inform you that I’ve obtained a court order to shut down this site and hold the individuals behind the site accountable for violations of enterprise-protection laws.
MODERATOR: E.H.
Go ahead and try. This page is presently hosted on numerous mirror sites. I won’t tell how many. :-)
USER NAME: The jig is up
You’re stepping on some pretty big toes, son. You won’t get away with it.
USER NAME: Poor little things
you been watching too many disney movies animals are good grub and that’s all they are they are raw materials if you start spoon feeding them and doting on them where will we be
MODERATOR: E.H.
I heard a story once. A boy climbed a tree. His teacher told him to come down. The boy asked why. The teacher said, where would we be if everybody sat in trees? The boy answered that we would be in a world where everybody sits in trees. The end.
SHOW ALL 82 COMMENTS
DAY SIXTEEN
Back at the house I make a hurried shopping list.
Canned goods. I’ll have to take them to the Other Side in several trips – they weigh a lot. Tools, nails, wire.
A good, all-weather tent to start with, a down sleeping-bag, a cooker, lots of fuel. Just in case of emergency – I’ll mainly be burning wood. Tough, warm, quick-drying clothing.
Salt, sugar, tight-sealing containers to keep rodents out.
A lantern and kerosene – or would candles be better? Maybe both. Nothing electric, not even battery-operated – of course.
How many matches will I need, or should I learn to use a flint?
Will I need soap? A washbasin or a bucket? A toothbrush?
Vitamin C for the winter?
The list proliferates, becomes endless, and I find myself thinking about money. How much is in the Port of Departure account right now? I never leave a lot of liquidity sitting around; I’ve always put the profits into sound investments. For Eero’s sake, I thought.
Sound investments?
There are so many reasons now to take the money and run.
I click on the console and bring my bank page up on my phone.
The console opens to the news.
/>
I stiffen where I stand, my fingers hovering over the phone. A flame of dread singes the inside of my stomach.
*
China. God, no. China.
They’re not just talking about that one bee poisoning in northern Szechuan any more.
They’re talking about colony collapse. Spreading like wildfire.
The sweaty professor on the screen is saying something about China’s cotton farmers and genetically modified plants and pesticides and how China doesn’t customarily communicate much about their problems with foreign powers, and now it’s all blowing up in their hands.
Blowing up in their hands.
What else do the Chinese eat besides rice? What’s their central source of protein? What has increased in consumption explosively in the past few years?
Pork.
It’s only now that I realize that the professor isn’t a biologist, he’s an economist. It’s not the possibility of famine for millions of people that interests him, it’s the stock market.
Once the feed needed to raise pork is gone – and most of it already is – the price of meat and other foods will increase to unimaginable levels.
China is on its way to super-inflation. In fact, it’s already there. The government can no longer subsidise prices, they couldn’t even if they wanted to, even if they issued so many yuan that they had to cut down all their forests just to print them on.
And what’s the country whose economy has long been inextricably linked with China’s?
The USA.
China has loaned the USA so much that a huge amount of US assets belong to the Chinese.
The Blood of Angels Page 18