“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 had 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.”