Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (56 page)

The fear-wall rumbled.

Isabella reached out. “If you walk the bee into the bug light, it will be electrocuted. That won’t be pleasant—for either of you.”

“I know.” My throat dried.
If this bee dies with me sharing its consciousness, I could go insane. My heart could stop.

“Adam, I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors about the Great Gajah-mada. They are true, in essence. I fear he won’t live much longer. Wasserman is good, but he can’t hold the show together without help. If you don’t succeed, I must begin training someone else immediately.”

“I know, I know. Thanks for putting me at ease.”

“Just remember, this is your twenty-eight-thousand, three-hundred-dollar try.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s make sure this bee doesn’t die, shall we
?
”

My fingers trembled.
If Isabella is a construct, what will happen when Gajah-mada dies
?
Will she dissolve like the wicked witch
?
If Wasserman takes over, will she acquire his personality
?

I couldn’t bear that. “I’ll do this alone.”

I plugged the circlet into the socket behind my ear, finding the bee in a dead end, confused by footprint pheromones left by previous bees.

We walked blind, careening off the walls as if in a stupor. I brought my consciousness-mist as close as I dared to the single pulsating gel cap that represented the bee’s mind. In the distance a white disk beckoned—the bee’s view of the world.

I dared not access it.

The urge to fly grew harder and harder to resist. What a glorious feeling, to fly. But that would only speed my demise. The legs moved, the abdomen rocked against the thorax.

“Describe what you see.” Isabella’s voice came from far away.

“A circle of light above my head.” I lied. I saw nothing.

“What is written on the pipe
?
”

My palms dampened. The fear-wall thundered like a train.
Now or never.
I gulped a breath and wrapped my mist around the gel cap. The world turned white. I thought I had gone blind until I realized that I saw the PVC pipe from the inside.

I saw.

“Red marks on the wall. They look like they’re made of coins.” My voice sounded garbled and distant. I could barely understand it.

“Read it.”

“Can’t.”

“Adam Clements.” Her voice stern. “Read the writing.”

I peered until it came into focus, multifaceted coin-like images sitting around my eyes rather than flat in front of them.

1 + 1 = 2.

Mary had a little lamb.

Isabella brushed sweat from her eyebrows with her right index finger. I could see from the bee—and from my own eyes. We were paired.

I laughed aloud.

My legs moved. I detected a tar-like odor on the ground, a footprint pheromone a bee had left in an earlier visit.

Joy! I resisted the urge to fly. I deposited a marker of my own. I navigated two more corners and read two more English expressions scrawled on the interior of the PVC pipe. They tickled my neocortex, reminding me of my dual nature. And then . . .

. . . a corpse. The bee Isabella and I had worked with the week before, starved to death. It reeked of vacuum bags.

I skittered around it. Far away, Adam Clements felt sad. I did not.

Electricity crackled. My stinger poised, I crept around a bend.

I will die to protect the hive.

A violet light surrounded by some kind of mesh half blocked the pipe, casting a pattern of bars on the walls. Static charged the air, as if a lightning storm approached.

I remembered something about this, something off, even though I didn’t smell warning markers.

No pollen, not a food source.

The roar of the fear-wall intensified.

The violet light shone like a beautiful flower.

Something pressed me forward, a niggle to my consciousness. I slicked a warning pheromone onto the ground. My gait became stilted. I cantered up the walls, slid down, tried again and climbed partway.

Stay as far away from the mesh as possible. Don’t panic.

The thought came from far away.

The static tickled as I passed. My wings fluttered. And then I could see through the smooth eyes once more. I had breached the fear-wall from both directions. I listened from Adam Clement’s ears. Joy filled my thorax, as if a new queen were born.

I heard human screaming.

The monitors over Isabella’s desk showed panic in the cabaret. The clientele bolted for the exits. A black tide of cockroaches wept from the stage.

Where is Isabella
?

Groggy, I reached to my ear and jerked the plug from its socket.

I became Adam Clements once more.

Isabella lay slumped over the desk. Her face rippled. The bugs comprising her skin had lost cohesion. I grabbed her by the armpits and helped her from the leather armchair to the floor.

She breathed . . . or at least her chest moved. “Heart attack.”

I put my hands together over her cotton shirt to begin CPR before I realized the absurdity of the notion.

Isabella was a construct.

“Whose heart attack
?
The Great Gajah-mada’s
?
We’ve got to help him.”

“Help Wasserman.”

“Forget Wasserman. The Great Gajah-mada is in trouble.”
You are in trouble
.

“Gajah . . . is . . . fine. He has a nurse. Wasserman won’t be able to handle the bugs alone.”

“No. If we can’t help the Great Gajah-mada, everything else doesn’t matter. The show will die.”
You’ll die.

Isabella put her fingers on her temples. Cohesion returned to her beautiful black skin. “Yes. Right. Help me up.”

S
he led me to the glass-walled atrium. Patrons scampered in every direction, jamming the exit, pressing to get out the single open door. Yellow and blue butterflies filled the space to its third-floor ceiling. One of them caught in Isabella’s hair. Two men grabbed armloads of programs. In the plaza outside, a mob of passersby stared through the glass.

We made for the elevator.

On the second floor, we sprinted through the upstairs lobby. Beside the restrooms sat a nondescript door I had assumed to be a closet.

Isabella unlocked it to reveal the Great Gajah-mada’s suite—private kitchen, bathroom, nurse quarters and bedroom. His room could only be described as a hospital room, white and chrome and blinking lights, the sort of place where one fears to touch any surface. A half bottle of Purell hand sanitizer beckoned on a shelf next to the door.

Wrinkles deformed his mouth. His eyes stared at a point on the far, white wall. A circlet sat catawampus on his head, partially covering his right ear. But his thumbs skated across a touch-screen remote—a mirror of the one Dieudonné used—with the adeptness of an adolescent playing VGs.

Medical machines beeped. A printout folded onto itself in an endless stack. A sixty-something nurse stood over a gray Formica counter preparing an IV. She glanced up at our arrival.

“The Great Gajah-mada.” Isabella curtsied and bowed, right fist over her heart.

His thumbs paused. She froze.

The thumbs resumed . . . and she rose.

A ghost whispered through the room.

“He needs rest.” The nurse spoke in a stern bass, startling me. I had forgotten her. “His heart rate dropped suddenly. I’ve already given him one IV to raise his blood pressure.”

“We won’t be long.” Isabella walked to the far side of the bed and knelt there, taking his left hand in both of hers. White tape secured a cannula to the back of his wrist. She bowed her head; her braids dropped forward, curtaining her ebony face.

Not knowing what else to do, I introduced myself.

“The Great Gajah-mada has forgotten how to talk in this way.” The nurse put the IV on a chrome stand and wheeled it to his side. “But he understands everything.”

Isabella said, “Take his hand. He enjoys the contact with human flesh.”

His tongue probed his lips, the gap where his front teeth used to be.

Human flesh
.

I knelt.

“Isabella thinks highly of you.” Isabella spoke in the third person.

Gajah-mada’s right hand dropped the remote and extended toward me. I grabbed it with both hands. The soft freckled flesh smelled of baby powder.

Isabella’s braids came to a complete rest.

“Sir
?
”

“She doesn’t really think, you know, not in the way you and I do, though she has achieved some degree of independence.” My bones chilled to hear that flat version of Isabella’s voice with no accompanying movement of mouth, throat or jaw, no faux intake of breath, no rise and fall of her chest.

Whir, click, whir, click went the machines, the endless folds of paper.

“Isabella must replace two hundred thousand insects a week. Such short life spans. If insects lived longer, then yes, I believe I would have created a new form of intelligence entirely. That is why the Hive and its breeding facilities must be maintained. Her life depends on it.”

“Very interesting.” I couldn’t bring myself to look at the beautiful . . . woman . . . kneeling across from me, uttering the Great Gajah-mada’s words without movement.

“Her hair sprouts from genetically altered bumblebees. I developed them myself. I was a geneticist before becoming a sculptor. Most of the later refinements have come from others. Our labs. The Thai. The Thai make great skin, don’t you think
?
”

“Beautiful. Mister Gajah-mada, sir, what will happen to Isabella if Wasserman takes over
?
”

“I did not believe you could do it, Adam. I argued with Isabella. I told her to find someone else, but she refused.

“You have a rare gift. You can reach deep into the insect psyche and return. Very few can return. For me, it was a one-way journey. My motor skills have been reduced to what it takes to manipulate the controls and the involuntary processes needed to keep this frail body alive.

“I haven’t much time. Pledge to me that you will take over where I leave off. Wasserman doesn’t have the strength. He will descend into rapture as I did. And then he will die.”

The nurse slid the needle into the cannula. “It’s time to go.”

I stood and released the hand.

“Pledge to me, Adam.” The hands found the remote again. Isabella stood in one fluid motion. “Pledge to me!”

I mumbled something, turned and fled out of the suite, across the lobby to the elevator, hitting the button multiple times. Isabella hurried after and entered behind me. I wondered if it were Isabella again or the Great Gajah-mada. I wondered how much strength her robot frame had. Could she become violent
?
Could the insects swarm me
?

The door closed. She backed against the wall, looking anywhere but directly at me. She seemed . . . embarrassed.

“Isabella, I—” I did not know how to end my sentence. My thoughts collided like bees in a jar.

The weight returned to our knees. The elevator opened. A giant empty space greeted us, the deserted atrium with its glass walls dominating rue Gagous. The real world.

Tourists, pickpockets and whoonga pushers milled about, oblivious. Isabella remained in the elevator, obviously intending to go down . . . or up. Time ticked.

I couldn’t let her go. Not completely. “Give me something of . . . of you.”

Her lips turned wistful. She plucked something from her scalp and placed it in my hand.

A black bumblebee sprouting a three-foot-long braid.

H
ere, let me help you.”

Isabella adjusted the knot of my red cravat. I had never been good at them. In the mirror over her shoulder, I watched her back muscles flexing beneath the blue scoop dress. She popped my fedora on, hiding the circlet and completing my gangster look. “There now, grifter.”

I dipped into Isabella’s consciousness—synaptic-like signals moving from insect to insect, gel cap to gel cap. There resided a lilac presence inextricably linked with my own.

I love you, Isabella.

A hard pinch to my cheek brought my attention to the now. “I want you here. Did you turn off your remote control
?
”

“Dieudonné is in charge for the soirée. We can enjoy the cast party.”

Isabella kissed my lips chastely. “Good. Traditionally, I am the last one to leave.”

The Great Gajah-mada passed away a fortnight ago. We haven’t told the media. My inclination is to simply take on his name. After all, I have taken on his greatest creation.

And I love her.

The range of the Hive’s circlet amplifier is two blocks. If I leave it, Isabella Mada will cease to exist. Although most of the creatures that comprise her live only a few days, Isabella will live as long as I do. Longer, if I can find an apprentice who defies rapture. I will not pass on the legacy to anyone too weak to handle it.

I am now a prisoner. Willingly.

The Year in the Contests

T
his is the year that Eric James Stone took home his Nebula for the novelette “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made” (
Analog,
September 2010).

The list of 2011 Nebula Award Nominees has seven Writers of the Future alumni listed, more than any prior year: Carolyn Ives Gilman (WotF 3) and Ken Liu (WotF 19) for Best Novella. Brad R. Torgersen (WotF 26) for Best Novelette. Tom Crosshill (WotF 26), Aliette de Bodard (WotF 23), David W. Goldman (WotF 21) and Ken Liu (WotF 19) for Best Short Story.

Nnedi Okorafor (WotF 18) has been nominated for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

The list of 2011 Hugo Award Nominees included several entries of writer and illustrator winners as well as judges: Nnedi Okorafor (WotF 18) for Best Novel. J. Kathleen Cheney (WotF 24) for Best Novella. Eric James Stone (WotF 21) and Aliette de Bodard (WotF 23) for Best Novelette. Mike Resnick (WotF judge) for Best Related Work. Shaun Tan (WotF 8 and IotF judge) for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Bob Eggleton (IotF judge), Stephan Martiniere (IotF judge), Shaun Tan (WotF 8 and IotF judge) for Best Professional Artists for which Shaun took home the trophy.

We are excited to welcome our newest contest judges: Writers of the Future judge Todd McCaffrey and Illustrators of the Future judge Gary Meyer.

As a reminder, Author Services has a special room dedicated to the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contests where past winners are encouraged to send copies of their published books. To date we have recorded 822 novels and 3,550 published short stories and we highly recommend that past winners send us copies of their published works so that we may include them in the library. And as an invitation, please come by Author Services and visit our Writers of the Future hall to see not only the library, but also photos and works of our contest judges and images of past awards ceremonies.

And, in very sad news, we had to say goodbye to beloved judge Anne McCaffrey in 2011. She passed away in Ireland on November 22 and left behind a popular legacy of fiction as well an unwavering commitment to help new writers. Each year, when her health permitted, she attended the Writers and Illustrators of the Future awards ceremony and spoke at the writers’ workshop. She touched the lives of everyone who knew her or read her fiction. We miss her already.

For Contest year 28, the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest winners are: