Unnatural Creatures Read online

  Sir Harry had developed his sturdy technique of encouragement during many a campaign in a haunted house and ghost-ridden moor, and it did not fail him now. Archer’s return to self-possession was almost immediate. Satisfied at the restoration, Sir Harry looked up at the ceiling.

  “You say it started as a kind of spot?” he asked, peering at the dark thing which spread above them.

  “About as big as a penny,” answered Archer.

  “What have the stages been like, between then and now?”

  “Little bits come out of it. They get bigger, and, at the same time, other little bits come popping out, and, as if that weren’t enough, the whole ghastly thing keeps swelling, like some damned balloon.”

  “Nasty,” said Sir Harry.

  “I’d say it’s gotten to be a yard across,” said Archer.

  “At least.”

  “What do you make of it, Sir Harry?”

  “It looks to me like a sort of plant.”

  Both the butler and Archer gaped at him. The

  instantly disappeared.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the butler, stricken.

  “What do you mean, plant?” asked Archer. “It can’t be a plant, Sir Harry. It’s perfectly flat, for one thing.”

  “Have you touched it?”

  Archer sniffed.

  “Not very likely,” he said.

  Discreetly, the butler cleared his throat.

  “It’s on the floor, gentlemen,” he said.

  The three looked down at the thing with reflectful expressions. Its longest reach was now a little over four feet. “You’ll notice,” said Harry, “that the texture of the carpet does not show through the blackness, therefore it’s not like ink, or some other stain. It has an independent surface.”

  He stooped down, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size, and, pulling a pencil from his pocket, poked at the thing. The pencil went into the darkness for about a quarter of an inch, and then stopped. He jabbed at another point, this time penetrating a good, full inch.

  “You see,” said Sir Harry, standing. “It does have a complex kind of shape. Our eyes can perceive it only in a two-dimensional way, but the sense of touch moves it along to the third. The obvious implication of all this length, width and breadth business is that your plant’s drifted in from some other dimensional set, do you see? I should imagine the original spot was its seed. Am I making myself clear on all this? Do you understand?”

  Archer did not, quite, but he gave a reasonably good imitation of a man who had.

  “But why did the accursed thing show up here?” he asked.

  Sir Harry seemed to have the answer for that one too, but Faulks interrupted it, whatever it may have been, and we shall never know it.

  “Oh, sir,” he cried. “It’s gone, again!”

  It was, indeed. The carpet stretched unblemished under the three men’s feet. They looked about the room, somewhat anxiously now, but could find no trace of the invader.

  “Perhaps it’s gone back into the dining room,” said Sir Harry, but a search revealed that it had not.

  “There is no reason to assume it must confine itself to the two rooms,” said Sir Harry, thoughtfully chewing his lip. “Nor even to the house, itself.”

  Faulks, standing closer to the hallway door than the others, tottered, slightly, and emitted a strangled sound. The others turned and looked where the old man pointed. There, stretching across the striped paper of the hall across from the door was:

  “This is,” Archer said, in a choked voice, “really a bit too much, Sir Harry. Something simply must be done or the damned thing will take over the whole, bloody house!”

  “Keep your eyes fixed on it, Faulks,” said Sir Harry, “at all costs.” He turned to Archer. “It has substance, I have proven that. It can be attacked. Have you some large cutting instrument about the place? A machete? Something like that?”

  Archer pondered, then brightened, in a grim sort of way.

  “I have a kris,” he said.

  “Get it,” said Sir Harry.

  Archer strode from the room, clenching and unclenching his hands. There was a longish pause, and then his voice called from another room:

  “I can’t get the blasted thing off its mounting!”

  “I’ll come and help,” Sir Harry answered. He turned to Faulks who was pointing at the thing on the wall like some loyal bird dog. “Never falter, old man,” he said. “Keep your gaze rock steady!”

  The kris, an old war souvenir brought to the house by Archer’s grandfather, was fixed to its display panel by a complicatedly woven arrangement of wires, and it took Sir Harry and Archer a good two minutes to get it free. They hurried back to the hall and there jarred to a halt, absolutely thunderstruck. The

  was nowhere to be seen, but that was not the worst: the butler, Faulks, was gone! Archer and Sir Harry exchanged startled glances and then called the servant’s name, again and again, with no effect whatever.

  “What can it be, Sir Harry?” asked Archer. “What, in God’s name, has happened?”

  Sir Harry Mandifer did not reply. He grasped the kris before him, his eyes darting this way and that, and Archer, to his horror, saw that the man was trembling where he stood. Then, with a visible effort of will, Sir Harry pulled himself together and assumed, once more, his usual staunch air.

  “We must find it, Archer,” he said, his chin thrust out. “We must find it and we must kill it. We may not have another chance if it gets away, again!”

  Sir Harry leading the way, the two men covered the ground floor, going from room to room, but found nothing. A search of the second also proved futile.

  “Pray God,” said Sir Harry, mounting to the floor above, “the creature has not quit the house.”

  Archer, now short of breath from simple fear, climbed unsteadily after.

  “Perhaps it’s gone back where it came from, Sir Harry,” he said.

  “Not now,” the other answered grimly. “Not after Faulks. I think it’s found it likes our little world.”

  “But what is it?” asked Archer.

  “It’s what I said it was—a plant,” replied the large man, opening a door and peering into the room revealed. “A special kind of plant. We have them here, in our dimension.”

  At this point, Archer understood. Sir Harry opened another door, and then another, with no success. There was the attic left. They went up the narrow steps, Sir Harry in the lead, his kris held high before him. Archer, by now, was barely able to drag himself along by the banister. His breath came in tiny whimpers.

  “A meat eater, isn’t it?” he whispered. “Isn’t it, Sir Harry?”

  Sir Harry Mandifer took his hand from the knob of the small door and turned to look down at his companion.

  “That’s right, Archer,” he said, the door swinging open, all unnoticed, behind his back. “The thing’s a carnivore.”

  2

  I keep bees. Or at least, there are seven hives of bees in my garden. (Yes, the honey is wonderful, and yes I’ve been stung, but not very often.) The strangest thing about the bees and wasps in this story is that all the natural history is quite right (E. LILY YU knows her bees) but it’s still, well, unnatural. Lily won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Also, she sings in elevators.

  In this story we encounter the mapmaking wasps of Yiwei and the colony of bees they see as their natural servants….

  FOR LONGER THAN ANYONE COULD REMEMBER, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw.

  Much later, after he h
ad been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope.

  The villagers’ subsequent incursions with bee veils and kettles of boiling water soon diminished the prosperous population to a handful. Commanded by a single stubborn foundress, the survivors folded a new nest in the shape of a paper boat, provisioned it with fallen apricots and squash blossoms, and launched themselves onto the river. Browsing cows and children fled the riverbanks as they drifted downstream, piping sea chanteys.

  At last, forty miles south from where they had begun, their craft snagged on an upthrust stick and sank. Only one drowned in the evacuation, weighed down with the remains of an apricot. They reconvened upon a stump and looked about themselves.

  “It’s a good place to land,” the foundress said in her sweet soprano, examining the first rough maps that the scouts brought back. There were plenty of caterpillars, oaks for ink galls, fruiting brambles, and no signs of other wasps. A colony of bees had hived in a split oak two miles away. “Once we are established we will, of course, send a delegation to collect tribute.

  “We will not make the same mistakes as before. Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”

  It took two weeks to complete the nurseries with their paper mobiles, and then another month to reconstruct the Great Library and fill the pigeonholes with what the oldest cartographers could remember of their lost maps. Their comings and goings did not go unnoticed. An ambassador from the beehive arrived with an ultimatum and was promptly executed; her wings were made into stained-glass windows for the council chamber, and her stinger was returned to the hive in a paper envelope. The second ambassador came with altered attitude and a proposal to divide the bees’ kingdom evenly between the two governments, retaining pollen and water rights for the bees—“as an acknowledgment of the preexisting claims of a free people to the natural resources of a common territory,” she hummed.

  The wasps of the council were gracious and only divested the envoy of her sting. She survived just long enough to deliver her account to the hive.

  The third ambassador arrived with a ball of wax on the tip of her stinger and was better received.

  “You understand, we are not refugees applying for recognition of a token territorial sovereignty,” the foundress said as attendants served them nectars in paper horns, “nor are we negotiating with you as equal states. Those were the assumptions of your late predecessors. They were mistaken.”

  “I trust I will do better,” the diplomat said stiffly. She was older than the others, and the hairs of her thorax were sparse and faded.

  “I do hope so.”

  “Unlike them, I have complete authority to speak for the hive. You have propositions for us; that is clear enough. We are prepared to listen.”

  “Oh, good.” The foundress drained her horn and took another. “Yours is an old and highly cultured society, despite the indolence of your ruler, which we understand to be a racial rather than personal proclivity. You have laws, and traditional dances, and mathematicians, and principles, which of course we do respect.”

  “Your terms, please.”

  She smiled. “Since there is a local population of tussah moths, which we prefer for incubation, there is no need for anything so unrepublican as slavery. If you refrain from insurrection, you may keep your self-rule. But we will take a fifth of your stores in an ordinary year, and a tenth in drought years, and one of every hundred larvae.”

  “To eat?” Her antennae trembled with revulsion.

  “Only if food is scarce. No, they will be raised among us and learn our ways and our arts, and then they will serve as officials and bureaucrats among you. It will be to your advantage, you see.”

  The diplomat paused for a moment, looking at nothing at all. Finally she said, “A tenth, in a good year—”

  “Our terms,” the foundress said, “are not negotiable.”

  The guards shifted among themselves, clinking the plates of their armor and shifting the gleaming points of their stings.

  “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “The choice is enslavement or cooperation,” the foundress said. “For your hive, I mean. You might choose something else, certainly, but they have tens of thousands to replace you with.”

  The diplomat bent her head. “I am old,” she said. “I have served the hive all my life, in every fashion. My loyalty is to my hive and I will do what is best for it.”

  “I am so very glad.”

  “I ask you—I beg you—to wait three or four days to impose your terms. I will be dead by then, and will not see my sisters become a servile people.”

  The foundress clicked her claws together. “Is the delaying of business a custom of yours? We have no such practice. You will have the honor of watching us elevate your sisters to moral and technological heights you could never imagine.”

  The diplomat shivered.

  “Go back to your queen, my dear. Tell them the good news.”

  It was a crisis for the constitutional monarchy. A riot broke out in District 6, destroying the royal waxworks and toppling the mouse-bone monuments before it was brutally suppressed. The queen had to be calmed with large doses of jelly after she burst into tears on her ministers’ shoulders.

  “Your Majesty,” said one, “it’s not a matter for your concern. Be at peace.”

  “These are my children,” she said, sniffling. “You would feel for them too, were you a mother.”

  “Thankfully, I am not,” the minister said briskly, “so to business.”

  “War is out of the question,” another said.

  “Their forces are vastly superior.”

  “We outnumber them three hundred to one!”

  “They are experienced fighters. Sixty of us would die for each of theirs. We might drive them away, but it would cost us most of the hive and possibly our queen—”

  The queen began weeping noisily again and had to be cleaned and comforted.

  “Have we any alternatives?”

  There was a small silence.

  “Very well, then.”

  The terms of the relationship were copied out, at the wasps’ direction, on small paper plaques embedded in propolis and wax around the hive. As paper and ink were new substances to the bees, they jostled and touched and tasted the bills until the paper fell to pieces. The wasps sent to oversee the installation did not take this kindly. Several civilians died before it was established that the bees could not read the Yiwei dialect.

  Thereafter the hive’s chemists were charged with compounding pheromones complex enough to encode the terms of the treaty. These were applied to the papers, so that both species could inspect them and comprehend the relationship between the two states.

  Whereas the hive before the wasp infestation had been busy but content, the bees now lived in desperation. The natural terms of their lives were cut short by the need to gather enough honey for both the hive and the wasp nest. As they traveled farther and farther afield in search of nectar, they stopped singing. They danced their findings grimly, without joy. The queen herself grew gaunt and thin from breeding replacements, and certain ministers who understood such matters began feeding royal jelly to the strongest larvae.

  Meanwhile, the wasps grew sleek and strong. Cadres of scholars, cartographers, botanists, and soldiers were dispatched on the river in small floating nests caulked with beeswax and loaded with rations of honeycomb to chart the unknown lands to the south. Those who returned bore beautiful maps with towns and farms and alien populations of wasps carefully noted in blue and purple ink, and these, once studied by the foundress and her generals, were carefully filed away in the
depths of the Great Library for their southern advance in the new year.

  The bees adopted by the wasps were first trained to clerical tasks, but once it was determined that they could be taught to read and write, they were assigned to some of the reconnaissance missions. The brightest students, gifted at trigonometry and angles, were educated beside the cartographers themselves and proved valuable assistants. They learned not to see the thick green caterpillars led on silver chains, or the dead bees fed to the wasp brood. It was easier that way.

  When the old queen died, they did not mourn.

  By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchist. It might have been the stresses on the hive, or it might have been luck; wherever it came from, the mutation was viable. She tucked a number of her own eggs in beeswax and wasp paper among the pigeonholes of the library and fed the larvae their milk and bread in secret. To her sons in their capped silk cradles—and they were all sons—she whispered the precepts she had developed while calculating flight paths and azimuths, that there should be no queen and no state, and that, as in the wasp nest, the males should labor and profit equally with the females. In their sleep and slow transformation they heard her teachings and instructions, and when they chewed their way out of their cells and out of the wasp nest, they made their way to the hive.

  The damage to the nest was discovered, of course, but by then the anarchist was dead of old age. She had done impeccable work, her tutor sighed, looking over the filigree of her inscriptions, but the brilliant were subject to mental aberrations, were they not? He buried beneath grumblings and labors his fondness for her, which had become a grief to him and a political liability, and he never again took on any student from the hive who showed a glint of talent.

  Though they had the bitter smell of the wasp nest in their hair, the anarchist’s twenty sons were permitted to wander freely through the hive, as it was assumed that they were either spies or on official business. When the new queen emerged from her chamber, they joined unnoticed the other drones in the nuptial flight. Two succeeded in mating with her. Those who failed and survived spoke afterward in hushed tones of what had been done for the sake of the ideal. Before they died they took propolis and oak-apple ink and inscribed upon the lintels of the hive, in a shorthand they had developed, the story of the first anarchist and her twenty sons.