But it was well past noon the next day before they picked up the trail of footprints. Mills and other crew members with experience in hunting and tracking watched through Mike’s camera, asking him to look at this and that—broken twigs and depressions in the dense mat that covered all but the largest lava boulders. Everyone agreed they’d trade a bath and a cool night’s sleep for one good dog. Ian followed Mike, safely out of sight.
After a few minutes of walking, Mike found himself in higher, denser wood. A glimpse of white caught the corner of his eye.
Pinned to the tree with a knife was a note handwritten in large block letters on the back of a ration envelope. Mike carefully scanned his camera around it before freeing it from the tree.
IT’S NOT MY FAULT THEY ALL DIED. I KNOW WHAT DID IT. HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE.’ I’M NEARBY AND I’M WATCHING YOU.
Instinctively, Mike’s head spun left, then right, but he saw nothing. The brush was still too dense—too complicated. A gust of the evening wind ran through the forest, rustling leaves and making boughs creak like a rolling ship. For the second time since he’d arrived on Griffith’s World, Mike felt a chill.
WHOEVER FINDS THIS, IF YOU ARE ALONE AND WANT TO HEAR THE TRUTH, WALK NORTHEAST AND KEEP WALKING. DON’T PICK THE FLOWERS.
—DOCTOR KENNETH SHANKS
“We’ve figured that out, damn you,” Mike muttered to himself. He suppressed the urge to pat the smooth bulge of his hypersonic needle gun, and jammed the knife back in the tree, perhaps harder than necessary—it didn’t really hurt the tree, he felt—for all he knew, the trees here would like it.
He linked his data back to Ian and pressed on through brush, fallen logs, and dead needle-covered black lava boulders that looked like so many skulls.
“Don’t turn around. Got you covered. You—you hear me? You understand me, huh?”
Mike froze. The voice was a man’s, though uncertain, high pitched, and cracked. “OK,” he answered. “What happens now?”
“I’m not go—going to kill you. No. Why should I?”
Mike fantasized about being shot, with needles tearing through his flesh. Chaos. It was happening to him already.
“Take your gun out and toss it far… far away.”
Mike calmly did as he was told. “Dr. Shanks, I presume,” he said with an ironic smile at the historical allusion. “Will you come out now?” Shanks was the key, he was sure of it. But he would have to handle this very carefully.
Shanks walked around from behind him. His hair was matted and fell down to the middle of his back. He was naked, deeply tanned and moved his spare frame in quick little jerks. A full, shaggy beard obscured his face but brought attention to his wild eyes. Those eyes darted around and failed to meet Mike’s. Shanks had been bluffing—he was unarmed.
A vague feeling of disappointment passed through Mike, but his mind snapped to the problem at hand.
“Very well, Dr. Shanks. What’s your story?”
“You read the note?” He gave a kind of crazy laugh. “How doth the little busy bee/improve each shining hour/And gather honey all the day/From every opening flower.’ Do you know it?”
Mike nodded. “It’s from Isaac Watts. My older sister taught it to me when I was a boy after I got stung by a bee.”
“What did it mean to you?” Shanks seemed suddenly very grave, as if this were extremely important.
Mike tried to answer seriously. “Stings are part of life. The bee can drink from the flower with impunity, but if you stick your nose in, you get stung. Pretty doesn’t mean safe? A decoration for us is a job for a bee? It’s poetry, Shanks—it means whatever you read into it.”
Shanks stared at the ground, fidgeting. “It wasn’t the flowers; it was the caterpillars, but death came from every opening flower that spring.” His eyes went wide. “Death! Insane death!” Shanks chopped a hand toward a fallen tree. “Sit down. You’ll listen, won’t you? You’ll listen to me?”
Mike sat. Ian should catch up to him soon.
“It’s not my fault. There was a mutation, don’t you see? There had to be. We couldn’t find it and couldn’t fix it.” Shanks’s agitation seemed to recede a bit, his voice losing its edge.
“Maybe if you just tell me about when it started…”
Shanks sat down and said nothing.
Finally Mike said, over the sounds of the darkening forest, “You had a suicide epidemic?”
Shanks took a deep breath and nodded sharply, ripples running down his long hair.
“I didn’t know what was happening at first,” Shanks blurted. “People got itches and scratched themselves raw. Bhenaz and Nicci, two of our systems engineers, went crazy with body piercing—without anesthetic. Another couple hacked each other to death.
“President Tams didn’t want to spread panic so she put out the word that they’d apparently taken a marital dispute over the top. We put the bodies in bags in the food cooler. She quarantined the data—kept it on planet—didn’t want people to think she was responsible for a murder-suicide epidemic. I begged Tams to send the data out. I—I knew something was very wrong.”
“I’ll bet you did. What was wrong, Shanks?”
“No!” Shanks sprung up, hit a tree with his fist, and spun around waving his arms wildly. “I can’t—I tried—It’s not my fault!”
“Take it easy.” Where was Ian? Mike asked himself silently.
Shanks looked into the forest for a moment, then sat back down. “Bhenaz and Nicci told me—they said if it ever got out about how good this was, the whole human race would kill itself. They were nuts by that time, of course. But they had the codes. They inhibited the orbital systems so the AIs wouldn’t interfere, trashed the data, and then trashed themselves.”
“Go on.”
“Pretty soon I was the only sane one left. Ha! Their minds… they made play of it—re-created savage anachronisms; vivisection, human sacrifice, swordfights, gunfights, eating each other alive. Do you know what that’s like to watch when you can’t—do anything about it?”
Mike shook his head and suppressed an awful thought. No, he had thought it. He had wondered about what being eaten alive felt like and the idea had excited him. He needed help. Later. “You said the caterpillars then, not the flowers, were the vector?”
Shanks bobbed his head, and looked like he was going to cry. “We almost had it under control. Just keep away from the flowers. Then, then—the springtimers bloomed.”
“The what?”
“The adult form of the caterpillars. They’re based on a cicada—the seventeen-year locust of Earth. Mom and Dad designed them. They look like crickets except when they fly. Then they look like butterflies. We named them springtimers because of when they hatch, that’s when the really warm season sets in here, about now. They were hatching out of chrysalises by the thousands. This was their first appearance—it was supposed to be kind of a surprise for everyone. I was in on it with Dad and Mom.
“The Wendy flowers are named after Mom. Several insects attach chrysalises to them, including the springtimers. The imago—the adult springtimers—were plectoptera but had characteristics of the lepidoptera on Earth—a stable genetic chimera we made by loop splicing, mostly on the J-457 morphobehavioral set. You don’t know bug genes—I can tell by your face.”
Mike felt a momentary sense of disconnect, being lectured in esoteric entomology by someone that to all outer appearances was a wildly crazy naked person.
“The first time the imago came out, they started biting everyone, just like the caterpillars.”
“So everyone got it. Why were you spared? What made you immune to the insanity?”
“I don’t know!” He half rose, then sighed and sat down again. “Dena didn’t know either. We had… a thing, until this happened. Then, a few days after, I began hiding out in the forest. I watched them get ready to burn her alive. They were making a big ceremony of it. I tried to save her. They came after me and I started shooting. They laughed. I kept shooting and shooting. I couldn’t stop… When they were all down, Dena walked over to me—they hadn’t tied her up or anything. I should have known she didn’t want to be saved.”