by Neil Clarke
“No scolding anymore, right, Ciro?” The hearty assurance was back, but all she could hear were the cracks.
“But it’s true, the bees did save me! I’m sorry so many of them died, but these are alive. They were worried about you.” His voice trembled, and in spite of the pain and the nausea, Mishka smiled. He wasn’t feigning now, whatever had happened, he believed the bees had saved him.
“Look!” He thrust something right in front of her face.
She blinked, her vision clearing a bit. Against the gauzy white of his limbs, she could distinguish a fist-sized smudge of sun-yellow, catching her breath with its promise. Her honeycomb necklace—heart of her hive.
“Here!”
She cradled the necklace as gently as she could, her fingers delicately tap-tap-tapping against the comb—a hum answered, and tears blossomed in her eyes.
Her little queen, her nurses, some of her brood were alive. She would be able to rebuild her hive. There were other greenhouses, other bids. All was not lost.
“Will you teach me to feed the bees? Like you do?”
And here in front of her was this injured child, looking at her with such hope.
“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.”
Ciro’s smile slipped. “But I think this one likes me. He’s been feeding me honey the whole time.”
“She. The bee is a she.”
“Oh.” A pause. “But it has a penis. Look!”
And he thrust a bee right under her nose, a slightly larger than average bee, golden as the sun. Of course Singsong would have survived, possibly even nursed the boy with honey. What a miracle she was.
“See?” He pointed to Singsong’s stinger. “I told you he has a penis!”
Mishka couldn’t help but laugh and even Gabhan chuckled, as they both tried to explain what exactly a stinger was and why all of Mishka’s bees were girls, and the laughter brought hope with it, as it always does.
“Please teach me to help the bees, okay? I’ll do anything.”
But no amount of laughter would make it possible for a male to become a hiver, even if he would do anything. Gabhan was a hand-pollinator; he must know that hivers had to be female. “Gabhan, hivers all have to be—”
“He needs something to think about while he waits for the bandages to come off.” The words were quick as cuts, quick enough to cut her sentence off forever, but light as pollen blown by the wind, as if by keeping his tone light, the words would never land, and never landing, time would cease, and those bandages would never have to come off. For what would happen when the bandages came off? What would a hand-pollinator do without hands? If Gabhan couldn’t face those questions yet, she couldn’t blame him.
She inhaled deeply. What a mash of smells in the warm sled. Pickled beets. The honey of her bees. Gabhan’s scared fierce musk. Her own fear-sweat and sweet-nectar, clouding the terrible burned smell of what remained of Ciro’s hands. What agony for the boy—she was sure he’d become coerced into hand-pollination, and that coercion had led to catastrophe. What could she say? Singsong at least seemed to have picked the boy. That counted for something. Maybe right now, that counted for everything.
“Okay. I’ll teach you what I can. Come here.”
The boy whooped. “I knew you’d help. I just knew it!”
Carefully, finally, after hours of not itching, Mishka gently, gently scratched her clavicle—at last! Even in the midst of catastrophe, a surge of joy welled as fresh nectar began to flow, and Singsong suckled. “Do you see her tongue? It’s a kind of straw. We call it her glossa, or proboscis.”
“What does she call it?”
Mishka chuckled. Even Singsong seemed to buzz a honeybee laughter. “I don’t know, Ciro. Maybe you’ll be the one to find out.”
And for a moment, it seemed as if in spite of the whole disaster, everything was going to be all right. Who knew what apiarists could do, with a nurse bee and a devoted four-year-old boy?
Mishka wouldn’t be the one to say no, nothing is possible. Say no today, and there may not be a tomorrow. Maybe the Allmond greenhouse was doomed. Maybe all the greenhouses along the fault line were doomed. Or maybe they’d sled back tomorrow and find the Arborist was dead wrong in Their catastrophic doomsaying. But there were other continents, and other ways of heating greenhouses.
For as long as Singsong could fly and find flowers, and for as long as there were Ciros willing to do anything they could to help the bees, there could be a tomorrow. And as long as there could be a tomorrow, there was a chance. A chance that humanity could adapt. Keep calling this place home. Wasn’t that what they’d always wanted, even back when Earth was called Eden?
Honeycomb
“This we have now/is not imagination . . . This/ that we are now/created the body, cell by cell,/like bees building a honeycomb./The human body and the universe/grew from this, not this/from the universe and the human body.”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi
SingSong waited. She wanted to save little queen, save big queen, save earth queen.
But all she could do was see if the child would wake. Taste the honey. Tend the honey.
Every night, the same wait. The boy had survived. But each darkness she doubted if he would breathe come dawn.
She could always go impale herself on a frozen branch of a petrified tree, suss the ice nectar of a forgotten species, call that consummation.
But for now she would wait. If the child woke, they would begin again. Pollinate one flower. Waggle one dance. Nurse one bee. Didn’t matter boy child or girl child, it was a child. And children could learn. Create. Mate. Come awake.
Humans were not earth queen, able to change the hum on a whim—but maybe she and big queen and little queen and the child could make a new hive, and survive the whims and untamed hums of earth queen.
Breathe with me, she buzzed.
Ravish today; make us a tomorrow.
About the Author
Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a writer and actor. Her work has appeared in ASIM, Farrago’s Wainscot, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, Tin House, The Way of the Wizard, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014, and elsewhere. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007 and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She also loves and worries about the bees of our world. Check out www.honeylove.org and www.thehoneybeeconservancy.org if you do too.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Xia Jia, translated by Ken Liu
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Li Yunsong (librarian, traveler on a winter’s night)
posted on 20xx-04-06
Many are the ways of commemorating the dead, and no one can say which is best—not even the dead.
The method I’m about to tell you is perhaps the strangest of them all.
My father was a librarian. Years ago, when I was a little child, he used to bring me to work and let me loose among the dusty tomes on old shelves. The experience forged an emotional bond between me and paper books. I could spend a whole day with my head buried in a book, careless of the absence of other entertainments. As I grew up, I discovered that the world outside the library was far more complicated, and I had a hard time adjusting. Socially awkward and having few friends, I returned to my hometown after college and started working at my father’s old library. It felt natural, like a book finding the exact place on the shelves assigned to it by the numbers on its spine.
There wasn’t much to do at work. In an age when most reading was done electronically, the library had few patrons. Like a graveyard attendant, I took care of the forgotten books and saw the occasional visitor, but there was little expectation of real conversation. The sunlight glided tranquilly between the shelves, day after day. Every day, I entered this sanctuary, quiet as a tomb, and pulled a book or two randomly off the shelves to read.
This was pretty much my version of heaven.
Borges once wrote, “God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of
the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents’ parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.” I didn’t believe in God, but sometimes I felt that I was searching for something as well.
One rainy autumn afternoon, the library received a donation of books. I opened one and saw a small red collector’s seal on the title page, which told me that another old man who had treasured books had died. His children had piled his collection, gathered over a lifetime, in front of his apartment building. Those which were worth something had been picked out by used book dealers, leaving the rest to be sold by the kilogram to a paper mill, to be gifted, or to be donated to the library. This sort of thing happened every year. I sorted the books, recorded and catalogued them, stuck on call numbers and barcodes, wiped off the dust, and stacked them neatly so that they could be shelved.
This took me two hours; I was exhausted, dizzy, and needed a break. While the teakettle was boiling, I picked up a slim volume off the top of the stack. It was a chapbook of poetry.
I started to read. From the first character in the first line of the first poem, I felt that I had found what I had always sought. Accompanied by the faint pitter-patter of rain outside, I chewed over the verses carefully, as delighted as a starving man who had finally been given manna.
The poet was unfamiliar to me, and there was only a short paragraph that passed for her biography. There wasn’t even a photograph. She wrote under a pen name, and her real name was unknown. She had died twenty years ago at the age of thirty-one. I pulled out my phone to look her up, but the Internet gave me nothing, as though she had never existed.
I felt a tingling up my spine. How could a poet who had lived in the information age leave no trace on the Web? It was inconceivable.
In the middle of the chapbook I found a library book request form. The sheet was thin, yellowed, but still well preserved. The borrower had filled out the form with the title of the poetry book as well as his library card number in a neat, forceful hand. I inputted the information into the computer system and found that the borrower had been a regular patron, though he hadn’t come for a few months. The borrower’s records in the database did not contain this book—which made sense, as the library had never had a copy of it.
Why would a book request form from my library be found in the private collection of an old man, and how did it get back here to me? Who was the borrower listed on the form, and what was his relationship to the old man? Or perhaps they were the same person using different names?
I finished the poems in the chapbook and shelved it as well as the other donated books. The next day, for some reason, I found myself in front of the shelf with the chapbook. It was still there, a slim volume squeezed between other books like a mysterious woman hiding in the attic. I pulled it out and re-read it from the first page. Though the poems were decades old, I could clearly sense from the rich, ambivalent images the massive waves of sorrow that had swept up most people in this age, like a lonely cry slipping through the cracks and seams of broken walls and fallen ruins, flowing without end.
Who was the poet? What did she look like and where did she live? What was her life like? Other than me, the dead collector, and the mysterious borrower, had she had other readers?
I had no answers. All I could do was to read the poems over and over again, like a fish diving deeper. The poet and her poems turned into the dark abyss of my dreams, concealing all secrets.
Three months later, as the first snow of winter fell, I met the borrower.
He was in his forties, of medium height, possessing a lean, angular face, and dressed plainly. When I saw the familiar string of numbers on his library card, I got so excited that I almost cried out. But the looming silence of the library reminded me to swallow the cry.
Using the library’s surveillance cameras, I observed him passing through the stacks and up and down the stairs like a ghost. I saw him walk into the room where old newspapers and magazines were kept, the only patron in that space. He retrieved a stack of bound newspapers and carefully laid it out on the desk, where he proceeded to flip through it slowly, page by page. I was puzzled. These newspapers were electronically stored and indexed, and all he had to do was to perform a simple search in the database. Why did he bother to come into the library to flip through them like this? Perhaps he was nostalgic for the sensation of bare fingers against old paper?
Suddenly, the borrower on my closed-circuit TV screen lifted his face and glanced around, staring in the direction of the camera for a second. Then he shifted his position so that his body blocked my view. A few seconds later, he moved away and flipped the newspaper to the next page.
I was certain that he had done something he did not want others to find out during that brief moment. Maybe he took a photograph. But considering all these papers had been digitized, what was the point of sneaking a picture?
Before closing time, the borrower approached me and set down that thin chapbook. I scanned the barcode but held on to the book. My curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to break my habitual silence and risk speaking with a stranger.
“Do you like these poems?” I asked.
He was surprised. It was as if I had been invisible, but now appeared out of thin air.
“They’re . . . all right.” His tone was cautious.
“I think they’re lovely,” I said. “No, that’s not quite right. They’re powerful, as though they could return order and form to ruins that had been slumbering for thousands of years.”
I told him how I had come across these poems, and repeated to him the quote from Borges. I spoke to him about how I couldn’t forget the mysterious poet, and even recounted for him how I had become the librarian here.
Ripples of emotion spread across his face, as though my words had been drops of rain falling into a pond.
After I was done talking, he picked a book request form from the box on the desk and handed it to me. “Please give me your contact info.”
I wrote down my name and phone number. Without glancing at the form, he picked it up and placed it between the pages of the chapbook. “I will be in touch.” He strode toward the exit.
I waited more than a week. On a stormy evening, my phone rang. I answered it, and the borrower’s low, sonorous voice filled my ears.
“There’s a gathering tonight we’d like to invite you to.”
“Tonight?” I looked up at the dense, swirling snow outside the window. “We?”
He gave me an address and a time. Then he added, “I hope you can make it.” He hung up.
His last words were irresistible—it had been many years since anyone had said “hope” to me. I checked myself in the mirror and left the library, opening my umbrella as I did so.
The snow was so thick that it seemed solid. There were very few pedestrians or cars out on the road. My town was too small to have a subway or tube transport system, and transportation was no different from how it had been twenty, thirty years earlier. I made my way through ankle-deep snow to the bus stop, and the bus also had very few passengers. I rode for eight or so stops, got off, and walked some more until I reached the address the borrower had given me: it was a bar that had seen better years.
I pushed open the thick wooden door and swept aside the cotton curtain. Warm air infused with an aroma that I was sure I knew enveloped my face. About fifteen people were seated in the bar in a loose circle, and there was an old fashioned coal stove—the kind that took honeycomb briquettes—in the middle of the circle. On top of the stove sat an aluminum kettle hissing with white steam.
The borrower picked up the kettle and poured me a cup of hot tea. I was surprised to see that there was a hint of a smile on his cold, expressionless face. He introduced me to the others, and it didn’t take me long to realize that most of them were as socially awkward as me, but I could see friendliness and candor in their eyes. They already thought of me as one of them. I relaxed.
I found an empty chair and sat do
wn. The borrower stood up like a host and said, “Good evening, everybody. Let’s welcome our new friend. Today is a special day, and I’m delighted to see all of you make it on a snowy night like this.”
The crowd quieted, holding hot cups of tea and listening.
“Tonight, we gather to remember a poet,” he continued. “Twenty years ago, a cold, stormy winter’s night just like this one, she departed our world.
“Everyone here tonight is a reader of her work. We love her poems but know almost nothing about her life. It is said that she was an introvert who lived like a hermit. She didn’t use the computer or the Web, and left behind almost no photographs or videos. Her poems received little attention during her lifetime, and were published only in a few obscure literary journals. When the editors of these journals asked for an author photo or an interview, she never responded.
“But one editor, who loved her work, managed to maintain a correspondence with her. Through handwritten letters, the two of them discussed life and poetry, poverty and humility, the terrors and hopes of our age. This was a simple, pure friendship, sustained only through the written word. They never met each other in life.
“Right before the poet died, she sent all her published and unpublished poems to the editor. After reading through them, the editor decided to publish a collection as a way to commemorate her dead friend. But she knew that the only way to make a collection of poetry popular was to package up the poet’s life into a story that was already popular with the crowd. The story had to exaggerate the poet’s mystery and solitude, dig up the scars of her family life and childhood, show her poverty and hunger, disclose her hidden life of love, and present her death scene with pathos. It had to be a story that would make everyone—whether they read poetry or not—shed tears of sympathy for a young woman poet who died too young, drive the crowd to curse our cold, commercial age for persecuting genius, allow each and every member of the audience to project themselves onto her. This was the only way to sell a collection of poetry, to grow her fame, to make her name last through the ages.