by Unknown
Mel supposed that she should feel grateful for the intervention, but she didn’t. Odd had thrown her into this trouble; she had to do what she had to do to get out of it.
“Bring her back,” the drone said, after a long moment. “We can talk about that maker of hers.”
He had another plan, Demetrius told Mel when she’d been returned to the outlaws’ camp. “We’re low on ammo. When we get hold of some high-density plastic and the necessaries for gunpowder, you can run off a big batch of bullets and shotgun shells on that maker of yours. And while you’re at it you can make some more of that liquor and your healing shit, too.”
“I’m out of honey,” Mel said.
“Bullshit,” Demetrius declared. He was looking up at her with his fists on his hips. “There must be a ton of the sweet stuff inside that nest.”
“It’s a hive. And the bees need a store of honey to tide them through the winter. If I dip into that the hive could die.”
“Either you help us or we’ll find a way of taking what we need,” Demetrius said. “And if we have to do that, they’ll die anyway. You too.”
“It seems I don’t have any choice.”
“Yes, you do. But your best choice is to help me out, like you would any other traveler who asks you for a favor. I’ll send Odd here back to Hangtown for ammo makings, and you can fire up that still.” Demetrius grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Drugs and drink and ammo: three of the best kinds of currency out here. Do right by me, grandmother, I might even cut you in.”
When Odd Sanders started to say that he couldn’t go back to Hangtown, there were people who wanted to nail his hide to the jailhouse wall, Demetrius held up a finger. One of his men stepped up behind the trader and punched him in the back of his head and knocked him to the ground. A couple of the other outlaws laughed. They were sitting around a campfire, passing bottles of Mel’s liquor between them. One spat a mouthful in the fire: blue flames flared.
Demetrius looked down at the dazed young man and said, “You’re afraid of the wrong people.”
“I’m not afraid of them,” Odd said, summoning up the shreds of his plausible manner. “They won’t trade with me, is what I was going to say.”
“Who said anything about trade? You can find where they keep their shit. We’ll go in and take it. But not tonight. Tonight we celebrate. Not you though,” Demetrius told Mel. “You go see to July. He’s still out cold.”
In the dim cave under the truck’s canvas cover, Hannah said that July’s fever had gone down, and he seemed more restful. Mel wasn’t surprised: she’d given the man a bag of balm doped with ketamine, the stuff she reserved for troublesome patients and to ease the passing of those too far gone for treatment. After half a bag he wasn’t so much asleep as catatonic.
Mel asked Hannah how he’d got himself shot; the young woman said that he’d gotten into an argument with another man over the price of a hat.
“So this other man shot him?”
“No, July stabbed the man wanted to sell him the hat, and the man’s friend shot July.”
“It must have been a good hat.”
Outside, someone shrieked in pain and outrage. Mel twitched back the flap of the cover, saw Odd Sanders writhing as two men held him down while a third poured liquor into his mouth. Hannah said, “They’re getting a real drunk on with your stuff Are you hoping they’ll pass out?”
“Not exactly.”
“They get mean when they drink. Especially D.”
“Does he hurt you, dear?”
Hannah shook her head. “He gets one of his boys to do it.”
“Because he’d have to stand on a chair to slap you,” Mel said, which won a quick smile from the young woman. “Does he give you injections to make you lactate?”
Mel had to explain what lactate meant; Hannah said that she didn’t see how it was any of her business.
“People think that keepers like me are hermits and holy healers who don’t live in the real world,” Mel said. “As if there is some other world beyond the one we all share. But I talk to people who pass by the hive, or stop and ask for help. And when I was much younger, when I was an apprentice, I went into the market of Hangtown every month and sold balm and honey and bought supplies. You need a quick mind and have to know about people to get a good deal. I got to know the market pretty well. There was a house in one of the little streets behind it. I’m sure you know the kind I mean. It specialized in the needs of neos.”
“I was bought, all right?” Hannah said with sudden quick anger. “The owner of the house got into debt and she sold me to D.”
“Was this in Hangtown?”
“No. Over near Detroit.”
“Is that where you come from?”
“I was born in Wisconsin. My father sold me to a place there after our farm went under, and a bit later they sold me on to a guy who took to me to Detroit. He was the one had me fixed up by a tinker, if you must know,” Hannah said.
“My mother couldn’t keep me either,” Mel said. “But I was lucky. She gave me to the Keeper sect.”
“And now you’re queen of that big old hive,” Hannah said.
“I’m the keeper. I serve the bees; they don’t serve me. But I’ve had a lucky life.”
“They had bees in Wisconsin. The hives were much smaller though. They fertilized apple trees. What do your bees do, out here?”
Mel liked her for that question. Hannah had had a hard life, no doubt, but she was smart and still had a spark in her.
“The bees do what they need to do,” Mel said. “There were homesteads here, once upon a time. Part of a big plan to rewild a city no one needed any more. The hive fertilized some of the crops. Medical tobacco, okra and soy, sunflowers and mustard. . . . Then there were summer droughts and killer winters, and the homesteaders gave up and moved away. But I stayed on. I protect the bees as best I can, and try to do my best by people who need my help.”
“You love them,” Hannah said.
“Of course,” Mel said.
But the bees didn’t love her back. Every keeper had to accept that. Some outsiders believed that because they were tweaked and networked the bees had somehow acquired sentience. They hadn’t. And even if they had, it was doubtful that they would have acquired any concept of love or hate, or free will. They knew only loyalty and the chains of duty: their life paths were engraved in their genes. The organization of the hive was as pure and pitiless as mathematics. Individuals were no more than integers in the calculus of its survival.
Hannah said, “I saw your hive. It looks like a fairytale castle.”
“The bees have been tweaked with termite behavior to build hives that are air-conditioned. It helps them survive the hot summers and cold winters.”
Wild bees and baseline domestic honeybees had all died out at the beginning of the Collapse. There were only tweaked swarms now, in hives tended by keepers or in wild daughter hives.
Hannah said, “I heard they can kill people. Bees.”
“One sting can do it if you’re sensitive.”
More shouts outside; more laughter.
“I mean you can use them as weapons,” Hannah said, with a flat direct look.
Mel knew then that Hannah was hoping that she could help her, and felt a flutter of relief. Things would go much easier with the young woman on her side, and there was the frail hope that afterward, if things came out right, that she might stay on as her apprentice.
She said, “The bees defend the hive, if they have to.”
“So do they defend you, too?”
“Of course. When I’m in the hive.”
“But can you make them attack anyone you want?”
“Is that what you’d like me to do?”
Hannah leaned across July and whispered, “When he doesn’t have any more use for you, D will kill you.”
“I know.”
“But you came over here anyway. You didn’t stay in your hive, where the bees could protect you.”
“I came to save a life. And because otherwise Demetrius would have come to me. The bees can’t protect me against people like him, Hannah. But maybe I can protect them. You too, if you want me to.”
“Maybe we can help each other,” Hannah said.
“I hope we can.” Mel opened her doctor’s bag and took out a little tube of liquid honey and told Hannah she should drink it.
“It will protect you against my bees. Give you the smell of the hive.”
Hannah uncapped the tube, sniffed its contents, then downed it in one gulp. She said, “I thought you couldn’t use your bees against people.”
“I can’t. This is for afterward.”
“After what?”
Hannah was all eyes in the dimness.
“After we deal with Demetrius and his boys.”
Mel unpacked her doctor’s bag. One of her patients had given it to her years back. It was very old, with cracked horsehide leather and brass fittings and a capacious maw. Mel lifted out the false bottom and took out the little pistol crossbow stowed there.
“People think I use the bees as weapons,” she told Hannah, “so they generally don’t think to look at what I carry.”
“Are you going to shoot them?”
“Would you have a problem with that?”
Hannah shook her head. She said, “What do you want me to do?”
“First, we wait.”
“While they get drunk?”
“While they get a lot more than drunk.”
The voices outside grew louder. Someone started to laugh and it rose in pitch and turned into raw sobbing. Someone else began to scream. And then someone shouted, “I see them! I see them in the trees!” and there was a gunshot. Someone was laughing hysterically and someone else said, “Look there! I see them! I see them too!” and there were more gunshots. Mel told Hannah to wait there and stay low, and peeked through the flap of the canvas cover.
The sun had set and everywhere was blue with shadows. A man lay unconscious near the dying campfire; he was naked and had carved up his chest with a knife before he’d passed out. Mel clambered out, froze when gunfire rattled hard and loud nearby. In the sudden silence, she saw a man just a hundred yards away, raising his rifle to take aim at the moon’s low crescent. Mel’s quarrel took him in the throat and he grunted and dropped bonelessly.
Her pistol crossbow clicked quietly as it drew its wire taut again. After years of practice, she could take down a sparrow in flight.
She shot a man howling and staggering with his hands pressed over his eyes. She found a dead man without a mark on him and bloody froth on his lips. Killed by a seizure. She heard someone scream in the trees beyond the campsite, suddenly silenced by the pop of a pistol. She found drag marks in long grass and followed them to where Odd Sanders lay on his back, eyes crossed as if trying to focus on the neat hole oozing in his forehead.
“Fucking bitch,” someone said, and Mel turned and she and Demetrius fired at the same moment.
Something punched her shoulder and she was on her back looking up at the dark blue sky. She tried to push up and everything hurt. Her breath was tight and she spat a mouthful of blood.
Demetrius came around the campfire with a waddling walk, kicked her crossbow away, looked down at her. She had forgotten he was a neo, and had aimed too high.
The eye of his pistol wove, now pointing in her face, now pointing away. He leered drunkenly behind it.
“What did you do to us?”
Mel’s breath whistled in her chest. She spat more blood, said weakly, “Mad honey.”
Foragers from daughter nests near the river browsed on the swathes of rhododendrons that grew there, harvesting nectar that contained a potent neurotoxin that caused nausea and numbness, seizures and hallucinations. Mel had drained a portion into the still before she’d decanted the liquor that Demetrius and his men had guzzled down.
The neo was weaving, cross-eyed, but still lucid. “Fucking bee magic,” he said. “I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to burn that fucking hive.”
A shadow rose up behind him, there was a hard hollow crunch, and Demetrius fell down. Hannah dropped the rock she’d hit him with, snatched up his pistol and shot him and shot him again, kept shooting until the pistol clicked on an empty chamber.
The old woman was tough. Demetrius’s shot had taken her high in the chest, clipping a lung, but she survived for more than three weeks and was lucid to the end. She told Hannah how to dress her wound, refused Hannah’s offer to head for Hangtown and get help. Her time had come, she said. She was ready to join the queens below.
She subsisted on a diet of water and honey. A light clover honey first, then a heavy dark molasses made from goldenrod nectar. She showed Hannah how to set up a drip that fed an infusion of balm and natural sugars directly into her bloodstream, and Hannah massaged her with an emulsion of honey and walnut oil every day.
Her skin acquired a golden sheen, and her sweat and breath smelled of honey. Her eyes turned gold, her fingernails translucent amber. Every cell was becoming permeated with the honey’s dehydrated sugars, preserving her body against corruption.
Meanwhile, she told Hannah about the bees and the hive, and the secrets of the vanished sect to which she had once belonged. It came tumbling out in no particular order, and she often repeated herself—the only sign that she was dying. “Bees know,” she said, over and again. “The secret is to let them work. They know what to do.”
Hannah learned how to harvest different types of honey from different parts of the hive, how to refine honey from the nursery combs to make balm, how to use the still to make honey liquor, how to use the wax extractor, how to program the maker to manufacture the quantum dots that every bee carried. The old woman told Hannah that she should begin to drink an infusion of dots too, so that they would cross the blood-brain barrier and connect her with the bees’ network by the magic of old-time technology, but Hannah wasn’t ready for that. Not yet, not yet.
The survivors of Demetrius’s gang hadn’t caused any trouble. Hannah had collected every weapon she could find before driving Mel to the hive in the trader’s pickup. By the next day, July had recovered enough to stagger about and shout threats, but he was unarmed and didn’t dare get too close to the hive. After Hannah fired a couple of warning shots he eventually drove off on his trike. Demetrius was dead; so were four of his men. The other two had run off into the city wilds while seized by the hallucinatory fever of the mad honey, and Hannah never saw them again.
Still, she waited for three days before she dared leave the safety of the hive and deal with the bodies. By then, they were bloated by heat and had been mauled by wild dogs, and stank worse than her family’s hog farm after the virus had swept through it. She used one of the trikes to drag what was left of them into a heap and piled brushwood over them and soaked everything in fuel alcohol drained from the truck and set it on fire. She drove the truck and all but one of the trikes into a draw near the river and, apart from the charred spot, she reckoned that no one could tell what had gone down there.
One day, she woke to find that the old woman was covered with a thin blanket of bees and knew that she was dead. The body was as light as a child’s and seemed to shine with an inner light. Hannah carried it down into the warm, dim cellar under the hive and laid it in the seamless plastic sarcophagus the old woman had had printed in Hangtown a couple of years back. The coffins of her predecessors stood close by. The shapes of their bodies visible in the dark gold matrices. The quantum dots in their brains formed the server architecture for the bees’ network, and now the old woman would augment it. Hannah wondered, as she filled the sarcophagus to the brim with honey, if anything of the dead women lived on in the bees. Ghosts in the busy machinery that filled the cellar with a deep drone like an engine steadily driving it to some distant shore.
Hannah had promised the old woman that she would make sure the hive was kept safe, but she believed that it could look after itself, like the smaller daughter hives s
cattered around about. They didn’t need quantum dots or a network, they lacked any kind of human care, and they were doing just fine. Hannah wasn’t ready to become a witchy fairytale hermit, a queen of the bees with spooky magical abilities. She knew enough now to know it wasn’t really magic, just some old tech and the bees. Mostly the bees.
“They know what to do,” the old woman had said, not realizing that she was telling Hannah that they didn’t need anyone’s help. The world now wasn’t the world as it had been when the old woman had been young. Like the daughter colonies, it had grown wild and strange.
So Hannah had no qualms when she rode off on one of the trikes toward Hangtown. When she’d gathered up the weapons, she’d also looted the little stash of hard cash that Demetrius had thought she didn’t know about. Her breasts ached all the time and she had to express milk four times a day, and every time she’d think of Demetrius wiping his chin and sticking his cigar back into his mouth. She was going to find a tinker who could reverse the tweak, put an end to that. And after that she’d figure out what to do next.
Hannah was followed by a floating finger of bees as she drove away. It stretched thinner and thinner until at last it was gone, and Hannah rode on alone through the hot afternoon. When she stopped a few hours later to make camp, she found that several bees had tangled in her hair. As she carefully combed them out, one stung her. She crushed it.
Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and many other magazines and websites. Her five published novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam. She has also written an urban fantasy novel about a Minneapolis woman who unexpectedly inherits the Ark of the Covenant; a children’s science-fiction shipwreck novel; a children’s portal fantasy; and a near-future SF novel set on a seastead. She has two ebook short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.