The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees
Page 15
“Ah, we’ll see about that. We have time to figure it out. Justice will have its day, you know.”
The other man snorted. “In the Services, we’re paid to know that. Literally. At least we have been since the Piazza Fontana bombing in ’69!”
Evangelisti got off the phone as fast as he could to make the necessary calls. If he was quick and to the point, maybe the gelato wouldn’t melt too much.
* * *
From that enormous balcony overlooking the Alps, on the stone-strewn terrain out of which jutted black, oblong rocks, humanity’s lights down below seemed dim compared to the thousands of stars whose light reached Earth after traveling the immense silence of infinite space, very often long after their originators had died. In the darkness, Martini removed his military jumpsuit and, completely naked, pulled a large metal drum from a carefully camouflaged hiding place at the foot of a rock. His panting from the arduous climb hadn’t abated, but he was now eager to get it over with. He removed the cap, lifted the heavy container in his arms, and the sweet mixture he’d concocted to nourish his revolutionary friends began to pour over his body. He sang softly:
You flew far from our trees
my golden bees,
along exile’s path
to escape the wrath
of capitalist life,
but now you must return,
it’s time to say enough,
enough apologies
from supertechnologies,
enough nanoparticles,
no more bits and megabytes,
enough chips and GMOs,
enough with pesticides
and all the world’s genocides.
With his body sticky, swaying, panting, he reached the edge of the precipice that delimited the relatively flat expanse. There, at the foot of a black rock, two steps from the precipice, was a gap in the stone. Kneeling down, he heard the sound. It was the entrance to a cave that must have been very deep and very wide, because the buzzing that rose up to his ears thundered like the rumbling of a mountain-sized giant’s uvula.
A bee came to rest on Aldo Martini’s forehead, another at the corner of his mouth. A third on his right hand. A fourth, a fifth . . .
The buzzing grew louder.
“You’re here,” he said, “you’re all here. All the ones that left the apiaries in the valley.”
Now his entire face, his neck, and his shoulders were covered with teeming, loudly buzzing bees.
His lips, with dozens of legs moving all over them, articulated the words:
“There are millions of you, and you will return.”
* * *
“So, that’s what it is?” Simona said. “This is Sacropiano’s project?”
Sunk into the armchair in Francesco’s study in the west tower, part of an addition built in the nineteenth century, the commissario shook her head incredulously. Giuseppe Felice stared at the screen occupied in its entirety by the image of a bluish rectangle and murmured:
“That’s it. Replacing the bees. With self-replicating nanorobots . . .”
He clicked on an icon at the bottom of the screen, opened a document, and read out loud for the third time:
. . . smaller than a grain of pollen, but capable of transporting them, they should prove to be infinitely more productive in terms of fertilization, and, therefore, infinitely lucrative. In the past, bees performed a job that remained firmly in the sphere of free labor: who could know how many bees from a given apiary it had taken to fertilize a single wild plant? Impossible. With our fertilizing nanorobots, our venture could allow us to extract a fee for every plant on earth fertilized by them. In a certain sense, this will mean the end of wild vegetation as we know it, as soon as we assume control of the reproduction of the majority of the world’s plants . . .
“Incredible,” said Marco, darting a worried look down the hall from his place in the doorway. “Now, shall we go?”
“It’s always the same process,” Felice observed. “Something that exists in nature and is available for free is destroyed and replaced by an artificial prosthesis that has to be paid for.”
“Shall we go?” Marco repeated.
Simona got to her feet. The liqueur she’d drunk was beginning to have undesirable secondary effects on her. “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go. But where?”
* * *
Quotidiano delle Valli
Incredible Attempted Suicide Attack on the
Pinerolo Research Center.
Behind the wheel of a stolen tractor, Professor Martini of San Giorgio al Monte plowed down the fence and the gates of the center before setting himself on fire. According to numerous witnesses, the tractor was followed by a “giant swarm of millions of bees.” The swarm reportedly disappeared minutes after the fire began.
Psychiatrists believe this to have been a “collective hallucination revealing unconscious fears.” The professor’s body was later identified.
It was an unprecedented event that seems to have taken place right in our quiet little valley . . . (Giuseppe Felice’s article continues on page 2, along with Bruno Ciuffani’s claims of “bias on the part of Commissario Tavianello, who persistently encouraged the disregard for democratic institutions.”)
* * *
Simona was always the one to drive. As usual, she had plonked her shapeless purse in her husband’s lap, but Marco didn’t even notice; he was too absorbed in skimming the newspaper’s headlines. He flipped through it nervously, turning the page again and again and again.
“Unbelievable,” he said finally. “There isn’t a single word about the Sacropiano project!”
“I guess that Alberto Signorelli decided to use it to put pressure on his brother and on Sacropiano. What a twisted relationship.”
“At any rate, the world should know . . .” Marco began.
“About the self-replicating nanorobots that would take the place of bees? But it’s science fiction nonsense!”
“What are you talking about?” said the police chief as he threw the purse in the backseat.
“I’ll tell you what they’ll say if we tell them about it . . . What time do you think we’ll get to Turin?”
“Who cares? We have all the time in the world, don’t we? Is that all you have to say about it? You think that the fact that Sacropiano’s research center has been destroyed will stop them? To the contrary, now that they can pose as victims of ecoterrorism, I think they’ll be able to accelerate . . .”
“Or maybe we can find an Internet café before we get to Turin,” said Simona, who seemed to be following her own line of thought without paying much attention to what her husband was saying. “Pay attention to the cities we’re going past.”
“An Internet café? What for?”
“Because I don’t know whether I’ll be able to send such a large file from my computer if I’m connected to my mobile network . . .”
“What file? Wait . . . did you . . .”
“Well, yes. There was a flash drive in one of Signorelli’s desk drawers. I have a copy of it too. And unlike Felice,
I don’t have bosses who would keep me from making it public.”
“Simona, you’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Yes, I know. Would you light a cigarette and pass it to me? I think I’m ready to start smoking again.”
* * *
When she had extinguished the cigarette and the maps showed that they were approaching Turin, she asked, “Do you think they’ll come back?”
“Who?”
“The bees. The millions of bees that were following Martini.”
“Simona, you know that was a collective hallucination.”
“Ah, no. I don’t know that at all.”
* * *
A little later, when they had just parked outside an Internet café, she returned to the subject.
“Let’s say that it wasn’t a hallucination. Do you think they’ll come back? All of the bees that disappeared—and not just from the valley. And if they do com
e back, what will they do?”
“Who knows?” Marco said. “Who knows?”
A note on titles and roles in the book:
In Italy, a commissario is responsible for leading criminal investigations and various other police operations. In keeping with convention, Simona Tavianello’s title has been left untranslated. Marco Tavianello’s title is “capo commissario” in Italian, translated here as “police chief.”
The Carabinieri, a law enforcement unit that is actually a branch of the military, are led locally by the maresciallo. Because this title has no clear equivalent in the American military, Calabonda’s title is left untranslated here. It is also worth noting that Carabinieri are conceived of as oafish and stupid by the national imagination, and are the frequent butts of jokes.