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Ghurab I hope this is not too long. I worked very hard on it, even researching bee behavior and such. It is about three and a half double-spaced pages in google docs so I think that should be okay.
The First Familiar
No light reaches the innermost chambers of a hive, but bees and Boolean both can easily navigate by sound, memory, and above all, scent. Today, I do not like what I smell.
The ripe fruit fragrance of growing larvae should be thick, but the brood holds only traces. Most of the honeycomb cells are empty, or seeded with an egg that will never hatch. A meager band of workers shuffles over the open hexagons feeding pollen to what larvae we have. Sometimes they release a jet of astringent, sour pheromones signalling
trouble, worry, dismay. In the distance I hear others fanning their wings to keep the brood from overheating, but it is only a near-inaudible whisper instead of the resonant hum it should be.
Boolean have kept bees for generations, but it can’t last much longer. Our carefully bred subspecies of the local perdita bees cannot survive in what Carrion Canyon has become.
Oh, it’s always been dry. But on still evenings, dew used to condense out of the cooling air onto each cactus needle, each droplet like an egg. Sometimes a flash flood would scour through the wends and forks of the canyon. Where the waters passed, they spirited away half-decayed animal carcasses, leaving clean sand and, after a few days, a carpet of desert blooms as sudden and short-lived as an eclipse.
I do not think any living Boolean has seen a flood.
Two of the workers brush against each other, hairs rasping slightly, and—
zrrp!—a spark jumps from one to the other. The shocked worker spasms once and I smell bright citrus: alarm! confusion! Senses overwhelmed, the poor bee thrashes like a lizard in a dragon’s mouth. Her fellow workers instinctively encircle her and carry her out of the brood. The calming pheromone they emit smells like rain.
We might have been able to weather the drought. The electricity is our real doom. Boolean-bred bees are highly electroreceptive, able to control currents much weaker than we Boolean can even sense. It was their greatest ability and now it’s killing them. A small spark must feel like staring at the sun. I’ve seen a shocked bee go instantaneously mad and fly full speed into the ground. I’ve seen one sting the worker that came to help it, killing both.
I leave the brood and crawl to the empty room at the top of the hive. Sunken into the wax wall is a hexagonal plate the size of my head, made of silicon painstakingly refined from sand. When I touch it with my antennae, it is as if a thunderstorm blooms in my nervous system, from empty sky to puffy cumulus to towering cloud-massif in nanoseconds. My mind is suddenly vast. I feel the whole hive like my own body: electroreceptive bees shuffling conductive honey in complex algorithms, veins of silicon bearing signals like pheromones.
Imagine flying through a narrow canyon, unable to see much but sandstone to your sides and a stripe of sky above. Then the gorge opens up to a valley and reveals every possible route to the horizon at once. When connected to the hive-computer, I can predict what will happen an hour from now, a day, a year, but not through magic, as some creatures do. Rather, it is just obvious. When you see a falling stone, you can predict it will hit the ground. With the hyperintelligence of the hive at my command, many future events are like falling stones.
And now I know for sure: it is too late for our bees. They are too few. They will die off. That rockslide has already started and nothing can stop it. Without them, we must devise another way to use the hive-computers, or lose hyperintelligence forever. Worst of all, the electricity is killing us too. Much slower, with our weaker electroreceptivity, but I now see that it will nonetheless eat away at Boolean society like termites through a dead desert pine.
But unlike our bees, we still have time. We have not passed the edge of the cliff. Ideas erupt through my neurons, but hyperintelligence is not omniscience. No matter how high you fly, some things are just too far to see. I have built a plan out of my quick, far-gazing thoughts, but not even the hive-computer can predict whether it will work.
I step backwards and my consciousness shrivels back to normal. I always feel slow and stupid after linking with a hive. I remember what I learned but I can’t fathom how I figured it out. How eerie, to have the memory of power without the power, to be incapable of grasping thoughts I had mere seconds ago. They have already drained out of me like blood from a wound.
I fly out of the hive. I wish I could tell someone where I was going, but my nearest neighbor is several gullies over. It hurts to abandon my flock, but I know they are already lost. How could I even say goodbye? No mere pheromone can say
tragedy, loss, grief.
Eventually I crest the eastern lip of the canyon, emerging into the sunset’s long rays. They warm my back for a while, until night rings the entire horizon and the last of the heat dissolves into the wind. Still, I press eastward. Ahead in the distance the sky flickers ultraviolet with lightning, broken by dark claw-shaped gaps. The closer I get, the taller they loom.
Before I can see them any more clearly, I can
feel them, pushing and pulling tidelike on my mind. These voltages dwarf our hive-computers by orders of magnitude. The draped cables are still invisible in the dark but their currents tug on me, impossible to ignore. And through it all, the lightning stabs. It would be easier to fly through a tornado! Is that throbbing in my brain real or imagined?
The spires are starting to glint copper with sunrise. I barely notice. I’m tired and drowning in electricity, but I force myself to scan the ground for caves, claw gouges, scorched bones… anything that might mark a dragon’s lair.
Thus, I am taken completely unaware by the behemoth plummeting at me from above.
Before I even realize what is happening, I am pinned in the dust beneath one forefoot. It is so gigantic that its wingtips are far outside my field of view. But the teeth—arcs like enormous shiny stingers—are all too near. Even the
nose is a deadly spike. My wings flutter involuntarily in its hot breath.
A pair of eyes darts from my antennae to my abdomen. They squint, and I can guess the dragon is puzzled by the geometric motes that sometimes flicker around me. After a pause in which I swear even the thunder hushes, it slowly lifts its foot. I think it expects me to flee.
It takes every drop of courage in me to instead buzz up to it and approach that face, those teeth. It only watches me, so I hover closer. When it doesn’t move, I tentatively alight on the very point of its nose. It blinks at me several times. I hesitantly press one antenna to the smooth, dry scales and give it the slightest nuzzle.
A sudden rumbly chuffing noise almost startles me back into the air, but the dragon seems… pleased? It gently plucks me from its nose and places me into some pouches slung across its body before leaping once more into the sky and turning toward its home.
No.
Our home.
