"So, we're safe?” she asked.
"Looks like,” David said.
Naomi took a step closer and put her hand on his chest. “Is something wrong?"
He wanted to tell her how it felt to watch the orange-and-blacks methodically visit each flower in turn, but it was too complicated. Did she know that apple trees grew branches thick with blossoms because they'd evolved with bees that were haphazard pollinators? That honey bees were such methodical pollinators that trees had to be specially pruned in order not to break under the weight of their own fruit? That orchards pruned that way were permanently disadvantaged when they had to make do with native bees?
That touching him had swept all his thoughts away in confusion?
"Being in the orchard,” he said finally, “makes me think of home."
"Oh,” Naomi said.
* * * *
"See these extended cells?” Zachariah asked, pointing at the honeycomb. “They're where the workers are raising new queens. ‘Course the first queen to emerge kills the others, so there's only a net increase of one queen."
"Just like honey bees,” David said.
Zachariah nodded, but seemed distracted. After a moment he said, “Actually, I'm surprised with Pa letting you see this."
"Oh?"
"People tried to steal watch bees, back when they were new. Never heard of a success, but I do know of a lot of ruined hives. And more than a few thieves killed by the bees they tried to steal. Farmers got pretty cautious about sharing even basic information."
"I guess that makes sense,” David said, letting his tone of voice indicate the opposite.
"No, Pa's right,” Zachariah said. “No point in being secretive about basic beekeeping skills. People have known those since ancient Egypt."
"Really?” David almost laughed. It only now occurred to him that, for all the hours he'd spent reading papers by the scientists who'd engineered the watch bees, he hadn't really studied the earlier history of beekeeping.
"People have been keeping bees for at least four thousand years."
"That's all I'm trying to learn,” David assured him. “I don't need to know the mechanisms of watch bee threat identification."
Zachariah frowned and didn't respond.
Realizing that he'd made Zachariah suspicious, David cast about for a distraction. Unable to think of anything better, he pulled the leg of his bee suit up, exposing half an inch of skin near his ankle. A bee quickly came to investigate, at which point he turned his foot so as to pinch the bee with the top of his boot. “Son of a bitch!"
"What?"
"Bee sting,” David said, backing away from the hive. “Ankle."
"Let me see."
Zachariah knelt to look where David indicated. “Yep. I see the stinger."
"Well, pull it out! It fucking hurts."
"You don't pull them out. That just squeezes more poison in. You want to scrape them out, like this."
"Shit!"
"Okay. It's out. But you need to head back to the house. The venom includes signaling proteins that attract other bees. The rule is anybody who gets stung needs to stay away from the hives for twenty-four hours."
As he headed toward the house, David cursed silently to himself. He'd meant what he'd said to reduce suspicion by making a show of ignorance, but it had clearly backfired.
He didn't need to ask about threat identification mechanisms. He already knew.
* * * *
The screened-in porch had been made secure against the bees. Clearly having such a space was a basic safety precaution.
Mrs. Ware brought him dinner, and then later brought a pillow and a couple of blankets. “The lounge chair doesn't make a great bed, but it'll be okay for a night, don't you think?"
He assured her it would be fine, but he was still awake more than an hour after everyone had gone upstairs and the house was dark and quiet.
So he was awake when Naomi came.
The nightgown she wore was ankle-length with a high collar, but the fabric was so sheer that even moonlight shone through it, showing David the curve of her body.
She moved to the foot of the lounge chair and shifted the blanket enough to expose his foot. She knelt down, tilting her head to let the moonlight fall on the spot where he'd been stung. She leaned forward to kiss his wound, letting her lips linger there for a long moment. Then, swinging one leg over the lounge chair, she knelt down over him and leaned forward again, this time to kiss his mouth.
Afraid even to whisper for fear of attracting her father or brother, David wrapped his arms around her and drew her close.
* * * *
Mrs. Ware brought breakfast out to the porch early.
David ate, thinking of Naomi. Thinking of her skin—cool in the night air, then hot against him. Thinking of how the tiniest movements of her lips could change her grin from shy to bold, from mischievous to saucy.
She had stayed for a long time. They'd both slept, despite the discomforts of the lounge chair, waking only when the birds began to stir. Then she'd crept away back into the house, pausing only a moment to laugh silently at his anxiety over the risk that she'd be discovered with him.
He'd slept fitfully after that, the earlier deep relaxation having fled.
Some time around mid-morning Ezekiel came. He stood outside the porch, staring in through the screen, the look on his face angry and disappointed. David glanced around and was a little surprised not to see Zachariah standing nearby with a shotgun. But then, there was no need for a gun. Opening the screen door would be as good as shooting him.
After a long time Ezekiel finally spoke. “A lot of people have tried to steal the watch bee biotech."
"What?” An initial flood of relief was immediately washed away at the thought of how his carelessness had aroused Zachariah's suspicions. “Mr. Ware, I—"
Ezekiel cut him off with a sharp gesture. “It's impossible. If they don't recognize you, having them puts you in as much danger as the attacker. Even if you could solve that, the watch bees are part of a system. You need all the pieces, or it doesn't work."
David said nothing, but couldn't keep what he knew about the failed attempts—dead hives and dead thieves—from running through his mind.
Ezekiel waited a long moment, then smiled humorlessly and said, “Let's pretend you said, ‘Pieces? What pieces?’ Then I can point out that you already mentioned one—threat identification. More: How to add a family member. How to remove a family member, if there's an acrimonious divorce. Must be a way, but someone who had that piece would be in a position to set the watch bees against their own household, so that's another: How to guard against that. Got to know or you're in constant danger. Sometimes, like to sell a farm, you need to know how to stand down the whole thing. There are layers. There's a system. Stealing it doesn't work. It's never worked. But sometimes it gets the thieves dead."
Ezekiel left after that, leaving David alone with his thoughts.
To distract himself, David stared obsessively through the screen, watching the bees. For their part, the bees carried on as usual, showing no special interest in getting in, unlike a couple of yellow jackets that buzzed persistently at the screen.
* * * *
Ezekiel kept a close watch on David as the queens approached maturity, but once the bees had swarmed and been moved to new hives, he relaxed a good bit. He showed a polite interest in David's reports of his family's progress in raising the cash to buy him a ticket home, and in the meantime helped him get a bicycle in shape for making the trip that way. He'd gone so far as to pay hard cash to buy new tires and inner tubes. Once the bike was roadworthy, David returned the favor by using it to run errands for the farm.
Stealing a queen, David knew, was exactly the wrong strategy. The thing to steal was a frame with a large number of larvae.
He kept tabs on the hives, looking for a frame with at least twelve very young larvae. By late June there were candidate frames each day, and David had gathered most of the supplies he nee
ded for the trip home. But rather than committing to a frame—killing most of the youngest larvae to free up the royal jelly he'd need to turn a few remaining ones into queens—he'd convinced himself that he might get a better frame if he waited another day or two.
When he admitted it to himself, though, his staying had as much to do with the extra mobility of having his own bike. That, together with the reduced scrutiny, meant he had an occasional chance to spend a few delicious minutes alone with Naomi.
* * * *
The sign said tavern, but it seemed to be a restaurant as much as a bar, with as many women and children as there were men. Half the space was taken up with a wedding party, farm families dressed up in their Sunday best.
Ezekiel had brought David and the family into town and sent everyone off on some errand or another. David's errand had apparently been much more quickly resolved than anyone else's.
David had just declined the bartender's third invitation to order something when an old woman detached herself from the wedding party and sat down at his table. “I'm going to hide myself back here. That okay with you?"
David nodded.
She was shrunken like a crone with rings in her eyebrow, nose, and lip. Her sleeveless shirt exposed arms and shoulders covered with tattoos made indecipherable by skin as wrinkled as crepe paper. “It's not that I'm not glad to see my fool godson smarten up enough to marry Rebecca. But if I have to listen to one more speech about the merging of two families, I'm going to hurl."
David smiled.
"You're a quiet fellow. Tell me what you're thinking and I'll buy you a beer.” Without waiting for a reply, she gestured to the bartender.
David had been thinking that he was unlikely to find frames with more larvae than the ones he'd seen that morning, but it didn't seem wise to mention that. But when he tried to come up with a plausible lie, his mind went blank. Then one of the wedding party stood up, raised a glass and, just as the old woman had foretold, started talking about the merging of two families.
"That's what I was thinking about,” David blurted. “How does marriage work when you've got watch bees? Whichever spouse moved to the other family's farm would be in deadly danger, right?"
"Yep,” the old woman said. “Takes two generations of queens to add skin cell surface markers for a new person to the hive's family exception list. And then you have to wait for all the old worker bees to die before the new person's really safe. The delay has produced some interesting marriage customs among Illinois farmers."
"That's interesting,” David said.
The old woman snorted a laugh. “If you're thinking about proposing to a farmer's daughter, I suppose it is. Otherwise, not so much."
* * * *
David heard gravel crunch and looked up to see an expensive hybrid motorcycle rolling up the driveway.
Ezekiel, pushing the spool mower, hadn't heard it. David touched him on the arm, then gestured with his rake.
The bike carried a man and woman. The man wore mismatched Chinese and Persian army surplus, the woman a pioneer dress over tight-fitting biker leathers and a full-face helmet. Only as the woman shifted to let the man off the bike did David see that she carried a baby in a sling on her back.
Ezekiel muttered something about perdition, then said, “Leave what you're doing. Don't let them between you and the house."
David moved to comply.
"Excuse me, farmer,” the man said. “My wife and I are trying to get to her family, out near Springfield. I was hoping you could spare a little fuel."
"Sorry,” Ezekiel said. “We just have what we need to run the farm."
The man sighed. “We don't need much. If you could spare just a quart, that would see us all the way. Any liquid fuel—ethanol, methanol, diesel, vegetable oil, gasoline . . . Even just a pint would help a lot."
Ezekiel shook his head. “If you and your wife are hungry, we can give you some food."
"No,” the man said, shaking his head. “We're not hungry.” He turned back to his bike and David began to relax a little.
Then the man whirled around with a pistol in his hand and aimed it at Ezekiel. “If you've got enough for a tractor, you can spare a quart."
David heard a shift in the tone the bees made, knew they were responding to the scent of gun oil, fear markers in Ezekiel's sweat, the growing number of strangers, and probably other factors he hadn't managed to tweeze out of the documents he'd read.
As the man kept the pistol leveled, the woman settled a beekeeper's hat over his head, arranging the netting to fall to his shoulders. That done, she pulled a larger piece of netting out and draped it over her helmet to cover herself and the baby.
Ezekiel spoke in a gentle tone, but pitched his voice to carry. “Dave? Run. The screened-in porch. It'll be the only safe place."
Having heeded Ezekiel's earlier advice, David had a straight shot toward the house. He turned and ran. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ezekiel sprint off at a different angle. He heard the crack of a shot and saw Ezekiel throw himself into the ditch.
The drone of the watch bees swelled. It started behind him, then spread across the farm like water poured out on hard ground. In just a few seconds it was so loud he couldn't hear his footsteps as he sprinted through the grass. Knowing that taking cover from the gunfire would be suicidal, David tried to pick up the pace.
Behind him, the man screamed.
This first shout of pain was followed quickly by another gunshot. Already running as fast as he could, David did his best to dodge a little left and right, but that shot turned out to be the last.
The screaming, though, went on. The woman's voice joined in. In the thirty seconds it took David to run to the farmhouse, he heard the quality of the screams shift—from pain to anger to pleading.
The pleading seemed to go on for a long time, cutting through even the terrifying drone of angry watch bees. David was glad he was too far away to make out any words.
Finally he reached the screened-in porch, rushed inside, and closed and latched the door.
Zachariah, arriving only moments after David, pulled at the door. Surprised that it wouldn't open, he prepared to yank harder.
"No!” David said, gasping as he tried to catch his breath. “Don't open the door."
Zachariah, a look of comprehension in his eyes, gingerly let go of the handle. “What happened?"
"A family. On a motorcycle. Wanted fuel. Pulled a gun."
Looking out across the field, David could see the lawn mower, but no people. Bees filled the air with orange and black.
"Father?"
"Dived into a ditch when the shooting started."
Naomi appeared from around the corner of the house carrying a .30-30. Wordless, she handed it to Zachariah, who worked the action to chamber a round, but had no target.
Then they heard the wail of an infant in pain.
"They had a baby?” Zachariah asked. He sprinted after Naomi, who had started running at the first sound.
Ezekiel stood and hurried to where the baby was screaming.
From where he stood inside the screened-in porch, David could see the three of them struggling to free the baby from its harness and arrange the netting for better protection. Naomi grabbed the small bundle and raced toward the house, but the baby's cries had already turned to strangled wheezes.
By the time she reached the house, the baby had been silent for a long time.
* * * *
David spent the night on the porch, listening to the bees, their hum still angry. It took him hours to fall asleep.
The first hour, he couldn't stop thinking about the baby. Naomi had gotten it close enough to the house that he'd been able to hear its last choking gasps. From where he'd been trapped on the porch, he'd heard Ezekiel shout for the bee-sting kit, imagined Mrs. Ware administering useless shots of adrenaline and antihistamine.
But the infant's death had only kept his attention for so long. Gradually his thoughts shifted. He'd started thinking about wh
at would have happened if his own family had suffered a similar attack. What had happened—the time Grandpa got killed, the time Uncle Walter lost an arm.
When he woke, shortly before dawn, the angry drone was gone. Cautiously, he unlatched the porch door and stepped out. First one bee approached and then another. When neither stung, David let the screen door close behind him. He walked down the drive.
The bodies lay where they'd fallen. Every visible inch of skin was red and swollen.
The swellings seemed somehow odd, but only after a long moment of peering at them did David realize what it was. There were no stingers left behind. Overcoming a bit of morbid squeamishness, he rolled the man's body over. Underneath it, he found what he knew he'd find—wasps.
Several had been crushed by the raider's death throes. There was nothing remarkable about them—they were yellow and black like ordinary yellow jackets, not orange and black like the engineered bees. But David had no doubt that they were engineered as well. In fact, some obscure references in the academic papers he'd read made a great deal more sense now. Larger and stronger than bees, with longer, sharper stingers, it made sense that they were the deadly part of the system.
The watch bees were like the magician's dramatic flourish, drawing your attention away from the real action.
* * * *
David left without leaving a note, unwilling to risk that it would be found before his train had departed.
He'd dug the grave for the raiders, and had chosen a site as close to a yellow jacket nest as he dared to dig, using the opportunity to do most of the digging required to take the nest.
Bees had been bred for four thousand years to tolerate human interference with their hives. Wasps had undergone no such breeding. In lieu of it, David nailed a screen down over the entrance of the nest. Working quickly, he finished the digging. Pulling up a plug of earth that included the entire nest, he lowered it into a five-gallon bucket. He'd already punched air holes in the lid. Now he put a layer of screen over the bucket, then the lid, and then used duct tape to add another layer of screen.
That done, he moved on to the bees. He surveyed the frames and took the most likely, killing all but a few of the youngest larvae to preserve the royal jelly he'd need.
Asimov's SF, August 2011 Page 9