The electricity was off due to a Hat Passing, and so when Marianna stated that my fingerless knit gloves were “update-ish”, “like a short skirt for hands,” I had no choice but turn on my Repeater Stick through a wrist-flick motion that had become a signature of my Style. The Repeater Stick expanded with a sharp telescopic “click”, immediately devoting to memory Marianna’s jabs and brusque mouth sounds.
I had made the thing, as we all have to now. I have had the fortune to live in the Bottom Hedge, Minor Seam-fold of red Mountain, a region primarily colonized by Repeater Bees, a kind of bee known for two things: a. unlike normal human bees, they won’t have anything to do with pollen, hive-building, or honey (see “Historical Note” below), and b. the Repeater Bee has the unique ability to mimic human and animal speech through the collective buzzing of wings and rubbing of legs. Fixed in a cheesecloth feeding-sack at the end of the Repeater Stick, the bees become excited and receptive when startled by the wrist-flick motion, measuring and resigning to memory sound waves and frequencies.
The only failing of the Repeater Stick is that, once the next recording occurs, the previous is lost forever as the bees have all the talent in the world but, alas, no reason to develop talent into vocation.
Be that as it may Marianna, shocked at her own profanities and slanders repeated by a constrained, yet intimidating, swarm of buzzing mimics, turned and stomped away. Then she stopped, pivoted on-heel, and give me the finger and a bye-bye wave. I sat on a seam-ledge of red Mountain, feeling a bit of the “Oceanic” drift as the tectonics shifted. My vomiting had been a little irregular lately, as I usually vomited twice a day (three if I’d had some tea or eaten more than one pomegranate). I was concerned about my health, as I didn’t know if it was a “just me” phenomenon or if my sea-sickness had been compromised by irregularities in the Drift. I closed my eyes. So far as I could tell, nothing seemed irregular about drift of Bottom Hedge; as usual, I felt like I was sitting on the side of a catamaran on calm waters. But I hadn’t vomited since yesterday morning, and the eclipse (the Hat was in waning position) seemed a little off-kilter.
I retracted and snapped my Repeater Stick again to make a note to myself: walk to other side of red Mountain, see if vomiting constitutional re-regulates as a result of. I figured there was no reason to keep Marianna’s comments, as they were either completely in jest or made out of jealousy over my fingerless gloves. She was just snappy because I’d gotten them free from the girls who work for their companies, who come around the bars giving out samples of tears.
(Historical Note on the honey-averse preconditioning of bees) Repeater Bees are the product of a typical reverse evolution or “involution” significant to species occuring In Rapture. Distinct from Devolution—a process of returning to a previous, less “fit” state—a species involutes when its genetic coding begins unraveling and revealing earlier, but not necessarily less “fit”, situationally, sets of codes. These could make them more fit or less fit for survival in a Rapturous environment, which is pretty much up to chance, Hat Position, the number of erections (male and female) occurring in a day, and the shifting tectonics of red Mountain due to the blood pressure in the center of the earth. Sometimes the earth’s blood-core is affected by Salt Intensities and shifting is sped or slowed. The requires a doctor; the usual landscapers are not qualified to correct the naturally occuring erections in people’s yards.
In the case of Repeater Bees, they involute to a state of honey-aversion, a state prior to the Bee’s special function as reproductive agents for flora and other plant and animal species that would later thrive on pollen carriage and honey production (there were dinosaurs for that purpose back then).
As lyrically recounted in the Jubilees, prior to their carrier function bees acted as free agents with few or no natural predators, similar to the contemporary elephant or ancient Histhonosaur but quicker on their feet. Also similar to elephants and dinosaurs, the Repeater Bee had no ecological purpose. They would thus wander, unrestricted by function, and came to be known “Gypsy Repeaters” in certain parts of Asia Minor, until a hullabaloo was raised by Asia Minorettes making a case against special insensitivity.
At a concise moment in prehistory, the Repeater Bee eventually became landlocked by oceanic winds and found themselves on an island with early forms of the honey- producing, carnivorous H. bicalcarata, a flesh-eating pitcher plant of approximately three feet due to the oxygen rich environment etc. of prehistory. The plant was a symbiot with anthropoid inhabitants who fed the plants early versions of muskrat (larger than present species) and foal (much smaller) whose only fossil record to date are various trace honey-drawings of what seemed to be crude dinners around crude dinette sets. There is no evidence of special holiday dinners, and it is speculated the drawings were made by offspring sent away from the table while their parents ate; the industrious children, no longer hungry and now bored, would inevitably use their leftovers as art supplies. Based on the representations, however, the parents disapproved of using the sticky sap on the walls. They used the honey as a preservative and a solution in which to store the muskrat, the foal, and other scavengers of the day in skins, feeding such “feeder sacks”, skin and all, to the H. bicalcarata. In response to overfeeding and anthropoid underpopulation, the plant gradually produced more honey than necessary, making it a more and more fearsome predator for flying insects.
Enter the Bee. As a foreign, free agent, the Bee found itself for the first time with a natural predator—-the H. bicalcarata. A moment from the Jubilees, while anthropomorphic, dramatically portrays this moment in the evolution of the prehistorical Bee into the pre-Rapture bee of Yesterday: “The bee, faced for the first time with a natural predator, shocked and repulsed, sickened by the draw of nectars/ would decide to cloak itself against itself./ It learned to make honey to throw off its own senses./ It learned to smell not the enemy/ so as to avoid the trap” (4.3). Soon discovering that bee honey was more subtle in fragrance than Calcarata honey, the anthropoids gradually learned to keep and harvest beehives.
This shift in lifestyle rendered several results: the bee was gradually integrated into the ecosystem with Previously familiar functions which it would take with it much later as the “modern bee” eventually spread to other parts of the world; but first it existed in the Abject Phase of Bees, which required it to produce what the bee’s instinct told it was essentially an unsavory waste product, excretions through its own feeding apparatus that it would mix with severe irritants from wild flora. Some zoologists describe this moment in history in such terms as this: “Honey, which we enjoy worldwide today and picture as something bees make happily in cozy little hives, actually comes to us as the results of a full-on allergy, a species-wide sneeze. To put it crudely, honey was pretty much bee-snot.”
On the other hand the H. bicalcarata became all but obsolete except in smaller “novelty ecosystems”; foals were now kept first as pets and gradually developed into modes of transportation as they were allowed to become full-grown horses; the prehistoric muskrat, no longer useful to the anthropoids, migrated away from oceanic habitats toward more marginalized wetlands, ponds, lakes, river banks, etc., gradually developing more contemporary features such as tail propulsion and burrowing instincts (speculated to have derived, perhaps, from their ancestor’s attempts at clawing their way out of the carnivorous pitcher plants before digestion) that have resulted in their symbiosis with aquatic birds and the nick-name “swamp bunny”.
2
I suppose I’m one of those people who would rather remember something than hear it played back. I admit that I have a cruel streak. Marianna really bothers me and, what can I say? Who hasn’t at some point wanted to release a swarm of bees on somebody who just seems like they deserve a swarm of bees? I don’t entertain cruel and ironic punishments for others, but let’s face it: everybody deserves a swarm of bees now and then. In my most adolescent fantasies, I think of my Repeater Bees and how that would be for Marianna. Imagine: ventriloquist bees stinging somebody to death! Pull the trigger and release a swarm of hungry bees saying Marianna’s name, the name right there in Marianna’s ear but Marianna, she is unable to grab the source. I wonder if she would go demonstrating that natural curiosity I’ve always admired; if she went, would she go with her legs crossed under her trying to grab certain imperfections out of the air?
