by Unknown
“Do you need any help with them?”
“You’re joking, right?” Daniel puffs himself up. His chest expands, his back spreads and, scarily, he actually looks even bigger than normal. “I can drown them in boiling oil whenever I want. Cuz, you have arc welders for hands. I’m not worried about you, just buying you enough time for you to do your thing before more of them show up.”
“You really get off on this whole service and protection thing, don’t you?”
“Hey, don’t judge me.” He actually looks a little wounded. “At least I’m taking care of the skunkworks, even if it’s for the wrong reason. Plant you now, dig you later, cuz.”
Daniel bounds away. The smile on his face is scarier than any weapon.
All Ellie can think of is Mom lying in bed. Mom’s head lurches up, staring at Ellie in a simulacrum of life that one day may be the real thing. Hope flares through Ellie, leaving her both empty and wishing it would flare again.
Mom needs her own universe in order to heal without trashing the one Ellie lives in. Of course, a new universe is the result of too many people over too much time to create a skunkworks that takes up too much space. That’s why they kludged this mechanism instead. It will work eventually, even if it also causes birds to migrate at the wrong times to the wrong places. Even if it has other countless side-effects that will take lifetimes to map out.
It’s built to be dismantled. The pipes that commit state are the only bits of the skunkworks it is connected to. It can be removed at any time. She can wait. She can let this universe too haphazard to understand, much less document, be the new normal until Mom is cured. The tides will be wrong and the foundations of physics may crack, but Mom will live.
Valves clack and pipes shrink and swell in time. From end to end, they jog and twist around each other at wild angles. Data travels through pipes that are too long and too hard to trace. No builder would route them this way except to work around pipes already there, all the other possibilities being even longer or harder to trace. Or functionally wrong.
Once, when Mom was still overseeing Ellie’s work, Ellie had found a truly elegant fix. Just a few short pipes connected at right angles installed in an easily accessible place. Piece of cake. They’d be done in no time. She rushed to show Mom, who slowly shook her head then pointed out the one case in billions where data would not reach the reservoir before its valve closed.
Instead, as isolationists bore down on them, Mom and Ellie threaded pipes through the existing tangle. The fix was time-consuming and ugly. Isolationists nearly caught them. But the fix was also provably correct.
Ellie looks at the valves she needs to hold open to flush out speculative state and the mechanism she might dismantle. She knows what she has to do.
“Attention passengers: the next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving” echoes off the walls. Ellie sprints and meets the oncoming torrent at the ticket gate. Even though the announcements are properly timed, she’s going to miss the train again. This will be the last time she makes the trip to see Mom and she wishes it weren’t.
Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novels are Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere.
WILD HONEY
Paul McAuley
Mel was in the warm dim crawlspace under the hive’s chimneys and stalactite combs, installing new harvesting frames, when the bees began to signal the presence of intruders. Irregular pulses of alarm code flashing through the net, older workers hustling toward the entrances to augment the guards, an urgent bass drone building.
Mel’s blood thrummed in sympathy. She went outside and with field glasses scanned the dun grassland. A witchy old woman in a faded patched sundress standing in the shade of the nest’s spires, a few ride-along bees clinging in her long white hair. It was late in the afternoon, very hot. Sunlight lanced low out of a flawless blue sky. Trees and stubs of broken wall cast long shadows, and something twinkled in the far distance, a star of reflected light moving out on the old highway.
After a minute or so, the star resolved into Odd Sanders’s battered pickup, driving in a caul of dust ahead of an old army truck and a pod of trikes. Odd sometimes brought petitioners out into the city wilds, charging them for an introduction to the crazy old bee queen whose balm could cure all kinds of sickness. But petitioners usually didn’t ride trikes, and as the little convoy drew closer Mel glimpsed bandoleers across the chests of the trike riders, and rifles and ballistas strapped to their backs.
Foragers were already out, shuttling between the hive and a stand of black locust trees half a mile to the north. Mel could see in her mind’s eye the shape of their traffic laid across the landscape, could see a frail spike of scouts bending toward the highway, and yet again wished that she could use the hive’s network to send the bees where she wanted, and peer through their faceted eyes. She watched as the convoy stopped about a mile away, near the fieldstone chimney that marked where the house of an abandoned homestead had once stood. Almost at once, something lofted from the army truck and curved toward Mel, gathering a smoky comet tail of bees as it approached.
It was a drone, the kind printed from fungal mycelium and coated in bacterial cellulose and wasp-spit proteins. Mel had once tried to use bigger versions to dispatch balm and honey liquor to Hangtown, but had given up after bandits had started to shoot them down. It looked like a pale cowpat, hovering on four red props just beyond the edge of the roof. A speaker whistled and Odd Sanders’s voice said, “You’d better come over. Someone needs your help.”
Odd Sanders had started helping out after Mel’s apprentice had been killed by a bear last fall. Rasia had been with Mel for eight years, a sweet-natured, dutiful young woman with a natural talent for reading the mood of the hive. Mel had been certain that when she joined the queens below she would leave the hive in good hands, but then Rasia had gone to collect windfalls in a stand of wild pear, and a lone male black bear had killed and half eaten her. Mel had tracked and dispatched him, but the effort and the grievous loss had almost undone her. She was old and tired, she had lost her successor, and for the first time feared for the future of the hive. Without a keeper it would go feral, like its daughter hives, or die out, or be ransacked and destroyed by bears or bandits.
Odd had turned up a couple of months later. A smooth-shaven plausible young man who told Mel that people in Hangtown had been missing her good stuff, and he’d be honored to do business with her. Mel had traded small batches of honey, honey liquor, wax, and balm for copper and germanium dust and a few personal necessaries, and he’d sometimes brought out people who needed her healing touch.
These visitors were some kind of outlaw gang, but Odd claimed that one of them was bad sick, and Mel was bound by the customs and conventions of a sect that no longer existed to treat all those who needed her help. They’d started smudge fires around their little encampment to keep away bees. Leaning on her staff at every other step, Mel hobbled through the haze of smoke, skirted a smoldering pyre of green branches and uprooted bushes, and discovered Odd waiting for her amongst a small group of desperados dressed in the usual leathers and denim and tattoos. One had a sword sheathed on his hip; another toted an ancient semi-automatic rifle.
Odd was uncharacteristically subdued and looked horrified when Mel told him outright he’d fallen amongst thieves and brigands.
“They’re travelers is all,” he said. He was tall and angular, with a mop of black hair that hung over his eyes. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “One of them needs your good stuff.”
“I know what they are, and they know it, too,” Mel said, looking around at the half dozen grim, grimy men.
When she asked who needed her help, a
piping voice behind her said, “Good of you to come, grandmother. Saved us the trouble of smoking you out.”
A small, fat, ruined child stood in the open flap of the army truck’s covered loadbed, dressed in baggy camo shorts and a cut-down, red leather jacket, a cigar cocked in his mouth. After a moment, Mel realized that he was a neo. They’d been designed for space travel, neos. Tweaked so that they stopped growing at around four years old. The idea had been that they would need fewer resources and could live in smaller craft than base humans, and although the Collapse had ended the old dreams of making new homes beyond Earth, they’d survived and thrived. Long-lived and clever, most preferred to live by their wits on the outskirts of civilization.
This one was called Demetrius Ten, telling Mel, “My man July needs your help. Let’s see if you deserve your reputation.”
The patient was shivering under blankets in the back of the truck, slick with sweat and unconscious. When the young woman who’d been dabbing his brow with a wet cloth moved aside, Mel caught a faint whiff of stale milk.
“He got himself shot,” Demetrius Ten said. “The wound went bad, we tried to burn the badness out, but it got into his blood.”
Although he looked like an overgrown toddler dressed up as a gangster, there was a malicious glint in the neo’s gaze and he had a commanding swagger. He could be any age from ten to a hundred. Maybe even older.
He watched as Mel stuck a temperature strip on July’s forehead and unpacked the stand from her leather doctor’s bag. The strip showed a temperature of a little over a hundred degrees, the man’s breathing was shallow and rapid, and his pulse quick and thready: he was suffering from severe sepsis.
The wound was in his shoulder, a neat, charred hole with a little clear fluid oozing from the black crust, no pus or stink of infection. Mel fixed a balm compress over it just to be sure, hooked a bag of balm over the tee of the stand, and asked the young woman if her patient had been given any medicine.
“Tell her what she wants to know,” Demetrius said, when the young woman looked at him.
“He had some whiskey when they burnt out the infection,” the young woman told Mel. She was sixteen or seventeen, with red hair and luminously pale skin. “He was drinking on and off for a couple of days? But then he got a fever.”
“What’s your name, dear?”
The young woman glanced at Demetrius again, then said, “Hannah.”
“She’s my little milk momma,” Demetrius said.
Hannah blushed prettily. Mel suddenly understood, saw Demetrius plugged into Hannah’s breast, pausing occasionally to suck on his cigar instead.
She said, “When exactly did July pass out?”
“Last night. I’ve been bathing him with water to keep him cool. We don’t have any of your magic stuff.” The young woman was watching Mel tighten a cord around the sick man’s arm to make the veins stand up.
“It isn’t magic.” Mel slid a needle into a vein and taped it down and opened the drip regulator. “A century ago I would have used antibiotics. But bacteria became resistant to all of them, so we must find other ways of fighting infection now. My bees have been tweaked so that they enhance the antimicrobial properties of honey made from the nectar of certain plants. I refine that honey, and that’s what balm is.”
Demetrius, puffing on his foul cigar, asked how long it would take.
“If the fever breaks he’ll probably live,” Mel said.
“He better. Hannah can look after him for now. We need to talk business.”
“I don’t charge for treating people,” Mel said.
Demetrius gave her a roguish smile. “We need to talk about my business, not yours.”
As they walked toward the hive, Odd Sanders told Mel a complicated story about people in Hangtown who resented his charm and success and tried to sabotage him at every turn, and a girl who, through no fault of his own, had fallen in love with him.
“And you got her pregnant,” Mel said, wanting to cut through the young man’s self-justifying bullshit. She had never entirely trusted him, but hadn’t realized until now just how little there was beneath the mask he wore to fool the world.
“So she says. I chucked her because she was so tiresomely clingy, and she came up with this story. And when I told her it didn’t change anything, because I frankly didn’t believe her, she went to her father,” Odd said. “He happens to be one of the people who have it in for me, and also happens to be a friend of the mayor. Well, her brother, actually. So I had to get out. All because some silly bitch wanted to get back at me.”
“And I suppose you seduced her because you wanted to get back at her father.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Still does in a way, you know? Now he can deal with her, and her brat,” Odd said, with a grimace of a smile behind the visor of his hood.
Odd and the outlaw escorting him and Mel were sealed inside in yellow biohazard suits much patched with duct tape. Neither the suits nor the pistol holstered at the outlaw’s hip would be much protection against the bees, but Demetrius had told Mel that if she didn’t come back with the goods, he’d load Odd’s pickup with brushwood, tie down the accelerator and the steering wheel, and set it on fire and aim it at the hive. Telling Odd, when he protested, that losing his pickup was the least he had to worry about.
Now, Odd told Mel that he’d made the outlaw boss promise she wouldn’t be hurt, that all they wanted were some trade goods and they’d be on their way.
“I hate to do it to you, but I need to put some distance between me and Hangtown as fast as possible,” he said. “And I need a stake to start over. That’s all it is. We get the goods, and we get out of here and leave you in peace. You have my word.”
“It isn’t your word I’m worried about,” Mel said, glancing at the drone wobbling through the air above them.
“Demetrius doesn’t want trouble. He knows your reputation. What the bees are. What they can do. I told him all that. It’s just like our usual trade, but this time I’m going to have to owe you. But when I get it together somewhere else, I swear I’ll try to find a way of making it up to you.”
The hive reared above them. Rooted in the ruin of a brick single-story house, its peaks soared fifteen feet into the air, built of grains of dirt excavated and emplaced by workers over the course of more than a century. Mel was its third keeper, having inherited it some forty-two years ago when the woman to whom she had been apprenticed had transitioned into one of the queens below. The exterior had been weatherproofed with a sheen of wax that shone black as oil in the sunlight. Bees shimmered around it like smoke: foragers heading out along airy highways toward the black locusts or returning laden with pollen and nectar. The outlaw swiped at a bee that landed on the visor of his suit, swiped at another that landed on his arm.
“If you keep that up,” Mel told him, “they’ll swarm you.”
“Listen to her,” Odd said. “These aren’t ordinary bees. They’re smart. All linked up into like one mind.”
He was quivering with nerves. Behind the visor of his hood his face shone with sweat; his hair was pasted to his forehead. He’d never before come so close to the hive.
Demetrius’s voice piped up overhead, from the drone. “Just get in there and get it done and get the fuck out.”
Mel lived and worked in what had once been a lean-to garage, its walls partly subsumed by the hive’s bulwark flanges and patched with fieldstones and corrugated iron. Odd was more confident once they were inside, and quickly found the cool box and started to pack the bags of balm into one of the knapsacks he’d brought.
“Every bag you take is a life lost,” Mel said.
She could trace the trajectories of the scouts that spiraled around the two men, could feel the intricate seethe of bees beyond the wall of the lean-to, see the queens and their retinues in the brood combs at the heart of the hive.
“They’ll save lives,” Odd said. “Just not here. And you always can make more.”
“You know t
hat takes time.”
“Then let the sick buy balm from the market.”
“And if they cannot afford it?”
“That’s their problem. Why don’t you start decanting the liquor? Sooner you do it, sooner we’ll be gone.”
“I doubt that,” Mel said, but she cracked valves in the stainless steel reservoir of the still and began to fill plastic bottles. A heady scent like a distillation of summer filled the air. Bees clustered around the rims of the bottles, hummed at the reservoir’s spout, landed on Mel. One stung her on the web between her thumb and forefinger. She hardly noticed.
The outlaw stood in the doorway watching her. The drone hovered at his shoulder. She hoped that they hadn’t seen that she’d opened the little reservoir inside the still before she’d started draining it.
Odd packed the bottles in another knapsack. When the still was empty, he rooted inside Mel’s ancient maker and took out the precious tubes of copper and germanium dust that the machine used to print the network dots that the bees inserted in every larva.
“Half of this won’t be enough for what I need,” Odd said as he cinched the knapsack, “but it’ll have to do.”
Mel said nothing. She felt calm but hollow. A high note hummed in her head in counterpoint to the hive’s drone. She wasn’t even startled when the outlaw aimed his pistol at her.
“Don’t,” Odd said.
“Why not?”
It was the drone that had spoken, not the outlaw.
“Because if you kill her, the hive will swarm,” Odd said. “Millions of angry bees. The smoke won’t keep them all off.”