Natalie Rule is a British/Australian writer working on her debut collection of science fiction short stories. She was an Emerging Writer at the London Library in 2020/21 and has lived in several countries, including Argentina, Uganda and France. She now lives in London.
Contact: natalierule@icloud.com
Persona Ficta
I have a huge endophallus. That is my first thought when I emerge from my cell, from pupa to imago, hungry, trembling and shivering. I cry out. Nurse comes, inserting her long proboscis into my mouth. Regurgitated sweet and sticky nectar secretions ease the hollowed pain of my belly. When nurse pulls away, I sign, ‘trophallaxis.’ Nurse signs nothing, nor does she register my attempt to communicate. Her eyes are pools of honey.
I am not like nurse. Metamorphosis complete, I am larger and more beautiful; my thick fur glistens, my flight muscles ripple along my thorax, and my antennae aren’t stout but slender, ever attentive to mother’s subtle signals. My big eyes watch nurse’s little ones inspect my endophallus. Satisfied, she feeds me more, gorging my stomach, stretching it with sweet nectar. When she finishes feeding me, she nudges me with her head towards the other drones and leaves.
My belly is so full, and my muscles so new, that I barely budge, but my brothers draw near, warming me, wings flapping, antennae stroking, thoraxes vibrating in a dripping, slippery infusion of drone pheromones. Like nurse, their eyes are all glazed and thick like honey.
I also have a huge belly. Keeping it full occupies me. There’s one thing I don’t have: a life outside. Forager and scout bees tell stories of a world eclipsing the hive. They race around our layered honeycomb home, gesticulating wildly. Referencing the position of sun bee to indicate where specific flowers bloom, explaining the quality of the nectar and where danger lurks.
Such descriptions suffuse me with curiosity. I want to tread on thin, exquisitely shaped and perfumed sepals, dunk my head within a flower’s innermost whorl, stick my tongue deep inside, and lap the nectar fresh while tangling stamen-loaded pollen in my fur.
My favourite workers have the best stories. They are old, with ragged, frayed wings and faded fur tipped with perfumes like chamomile, sage and rosemary. ‘By the pond, watch out for frogs. Their tongues will swallow you whole,’ they warn. ‘Always avoid humans; they’re dangerous.’
Their warnings send electric shivers of fear down my legs and antennae. Frogs, honey buzzards and grey shrikes eat us whole, but that’s better than the slow death ensuing if one eats poison. I can sometimes smell poison in the honey stores. Some of us eat it and get ill.
Alas, even forager bees, wise to the world, don’t have words for concepts I know exist, like poison. I warn them, ‘Poison!’ No bee understands. They can’t grasp the meaning like I can. Why do words come easier to me?
When one forager enters the hive with a part of a leg missing, oozing clear liquid from the wound, I sign to her, ‘blood,’ and gesture to the missing leg and the veins in our wings where the same liquid flows. She ignores me and is in a hurry to tell another forager where to locate blossoming cat nip and hedge nettle. Soon, she stops moving. I ask the undertaker how she knows when a bee dies? The undertaker doesn’t understand. Her antennae touch my exoskeleton, measuring its waxy coating before moving away. I follow. She checks the next bee she sees and anyone else she encounters. Later, I see her pushing the five-legged carcass from the hive. I understand death now.
Sometimes, hive language is complicated. One fur-faded forager bee explains that some flowers start yellow when their nectar is sweet but turn pink when they no longer make nectar.
‘What is pink?’ I ask.
No bee can explain. I know yellow. Yellow is bright like sun bee, so luminous she hurts my eyes. And I know blue because the sky is blue, except during shivering days when the sky ferments grey and weeps water.
Even when the sky weeps, the nest is warm. My brothers and I huddle and shiver, helping ourselves to the honey stores while workers grow frazzled over dwindling supplies. Yet, one glimpse of my throbbing whopping phallus is enough for them to hand me bee bread, a mixture they make with pollen and honey.
Soon, my world will stretch beyond the hive; my wings will broaden, sweeping through the air to take me places. Words and phrases like lavender, borage, hollyhocks, east of sun bee, and west of the large rock are committed to memory. I’m impatient to meet all these flowers and places.
My imagination swirls, building a world outside the hive that my body yearns to experience. ‘Create a flightpath,’ chorus my brothers. I climb over comrades to the hive’s exit. A worker blocks it, and another pushes me back inside towards nurse, who hands me some bee bread. Mother resides in another section of the hive; her scent subdues us drones, and her pipping tells us to wait.
***
Equipped at the base of my phallus are cornea claspers. ‘What are these for?’ I ask nurse. Her little eyes register my member. Satisfied, she hands me more bee bread and then butts her head against me, pushing me towards the other drones. I ask a brother who seems to know how to use them because he buzzes loudly, wildly gripping the edge of a honeycomb cell with his claspers. I am not sure he understands me, but I gather claspers are for grasping something desired. All the while, nurse feeds us, and we grow, coated in the oily hydrocarbons that identify us as kin, nesting, flexing our muscles, at ease with our vitality and beauty.
Sometimes, my chemicals make me so woozy from my aphrodisiacs that I practise gripping other drones, muscles rippling, claspers clenching. My brothers share the same drives and instincts; our antennae are as thick with pheromones as our bellies are full of nectar.
One morning, a worker passes me bee bread and then pushes me towards the exit. Is this my cue to discover? To fly? To create? It’s not yet warm outside; only two workers fan the entrance. Others will join in fanning as the day grows hotter. I shiver to warm my muscles, turning sideways as if to leave the hive, but I hesitate at the edge. The air is colder than anything I have known. Sun bee is still weak. My wings feel frozen and heavy, they stick to my thorax.
‘Make your flight path,’ chorus the workers. Other drones clamber behind me, eager, instinct urging them forward. The head of a worker bee butts me from the hive’s entrance, and I fall head first. Plummeting to the ground, the muscles surrounding my thorax begin pulsing and beating. Stiffly, I stretch my wings, twisting and rotating, creating little vortices of air above and below. These hurricanes I make with my wings make space near me thick, like honey. In air, I can hover, swivel and turn in any direction. Air isn’t constant but layered, thick, thin, fast and slow. I turn to face the hive, whose symphonic hum vibrates through my body. Away from mother’s pheromones, I feel free, virulent and victorious. A breeze pushes me east towards sun bee. I go west, knowing a headwind now will be a helpful breeze when it’s home time.
Create! Seduce! My flight path awaits!
My first marker is a branch. I land, mandibles containing excretory ducts dribble pheromones over wood, spreading my seduction. Next is a stone by the pond. Risky, lest the hungry frog lurks, tongue poised, beneath a lily pad. I don’t dare stay long on the warm stone, just enough to drip my scent and fly off, tracking space between my stops. The distance between marks requires consistency. Every detail is chewed over like pollen.
Where would queen likely go? My confidence is growing. This path is my life’s work, my unique creation. Each new marker must be colourful, aromatic and sexy. Seducing queen with my secretion is my life’s purpose. I weigh three potential locations for the next marker before hunger gouges my stomach. Shivering, already hungry, I scan for food.
Not far below, a plant with slender slitted leaves boasts an explosion of sprigs culminating at the ends in richly coloured domes. What is that colour? What is that scent? Hovering up close, I see that each dome is formed from hundreds of tiny delicate flowers, powerfully transforming their space into a cool haze of perfume, luring me, tempting me to taste their nectar. Yet judging from the shrub’s electric field, another bee has visited recently. I adjust my expectations, but when I stick my tongue deep into the first minuscule flower’s whorl, I discover it’s half-full. I probe again. The second flower is half-full like the first. It was only a honey bee, whose puny tongue couldn’t reach the flower’s depth.
I suck each floret dry. The taste is familiar. Lavender hovers on my tongue. Now I know the colour purple and recognise lavender plants. Sated, I dive high into the sky and hover, thorax muscles rippling, wings turning and twisting, eyes alert to danger Scanning below, flowers, grasses and even a few trees sway, buzz, and teem with life in its cacophony of forms, but no queen is in sight. From up high, fluttering butterflies, with their symmetrical wings and dazzling colours, adorn space like aerial flowers, while even flies look innocent, just dark shapes darting in space, their poo-drenched limbs hidden beneath bodies and wings.
Yet meadow is surrounded by danger. There is forest, dense with oak trees and peckish birds. Their aria warbles through the branches, a chorusing requiem for bees who fly too close. There is also field, a poisoned matrix. Identical large-faced flowers on pale stalks are arranged in tidy rows and columns. Flowers stretch beyond the limits of my eyes and reek like dead bees in the hive.
***
Like my brothers, I no longer return to the hive at night, preferring a warm crack in a tree’s trunk, where there’s no constant hive buzz, no workers watching me, no mother’s pheromones messing with my mind. It’s just meadow, sun bee and me: Glory, divinity and beauty.
Every day, we refresh our flight paths with pheromones, flit from flower to flower, lap at meadow’s banquet, search for queens high in the sky with other drones and bask on sun-warmed petals. When sun bee heads west to her hive, we sleep. Nights are warm, tiny lights flicker in the dark sky. With sun bee’s help, it only takes a little shivering each morning to get started.
During the night, another brother who shares my tree dies. Despite my warnings, he drunk nectar from field. I pass the morning with a pink rose, reflecting on why I am more intelligent than other bees. With sharp scrapes, my strigils clean my antennae, and sun bee’s rays soak my fur with warmth. I doze. Nearby, worker bees dart between flowers, sucking nectar and hurriedly filling their panniers with clumps of pollen. Their chores never end; back at the hive, foragers regurgitate the nectar for new-hatched bees and grubs, and house bees will empty their heavy panniers, taking the pollen quickly so the forager bee can return to foraging, filling her panniers and stomach a dozen or so times before night falls. Meanwhile house bees chew and roll unloaded pollen into clumps before passing it to other workers, who chew and roll the pollen some more, regurgitating and manipulating the clumps to make honey.
I stretch my legs, admiring their shape and strength, brushing them against rose’s velveteen-perfumed petals. I wasn’t born with hind legs ladled with baskets for collecting pollen. Such effort, toil and trouble are not for drones. I roll over in rose and doze some more. It’s then that a powerful scent awakens me. My eyes focus on queen.
Queen swoops by, beautiful, irresistible; dozens of drones chase her. My endophallus throbs, urging me into the sky; every section of my antennae is focused on queen. I fly fast, following the other drones, matching their lust but not their speed. Queen takes the fastest before disappearing into a hive thick with workers poised to sting.
I retire on a petal, exhausted and dejected. I reflect and repent. It was a brutal, competitive affair that left one or two drones with damaged limbs or wings. Queen’s pheromones, her power, drove drones to scramble over others, while only the fastest, not the smartest, copulated with queen.
The following day, having reflected on my seduction technique, and having consoled myself that there will be others, I amend my flight path, measuring angles, cutting corners, hoping my intelligence compensates for my speed. Satisfied, I look for a suitable place to graze and sunbathe. It’s then that I see the unfamiliar flower. This flower is like nothing I have seen or heard about. Florescent white flat petals splay like sun decks. Beneath the white epidermis, pink veins swirl, whirl and hypnotise. The flower’s scent is irresistible. I land softly on the petal, close to the exposed nectaries that dangle like grapes. I wave my antennae over the stamen to flavour the pollen, drawing the flower’s scent closer. It’s only then I realise my mistake. The flower’s surface is sticky. I’m knee-deep in goo and can’t move without ripping my six legs off, and it tastes disgusting.
I have heard about ruses, but never this one. Perhaps no bee has lived to tell the tale. Panicking, I flap my wings, attempting to free my tarsus with the force of lift-off, pulling up so hard that jolts of pain burn up and down my legs. Without legs, I will die, so I change tactics, shaking the petal so hard it quivers on the flower. Nothing. Next, I contemplate biting through the petal, but my pointy mandible might get stuck like my legs.
Think! The flower’s nectaries are accessible. I probe one, biting through the small sack and lap the tasteless nectar. I won’t starve, but even soggy bee bread is better than this. Ceasing to struggle, I contemplate and look to the sky. Blue. No weeping grey will wash away the goo anytime soon. Birds. My fluorescent sundeck is visible to peckish birds. Hot. Sun bee will fry me on this sticky, flat petal. Morbidly, I wonder which fate will be mine.
I disguise my shape as best I can against the nectary, drinking and dozing, willing my end to come quickly. Before long, a horrible sound vibrates through my body. I see a large, shiny, grey, hairless object flying towards me, churning and roaring, circling, frightening me. It has a thorax but no legs. Its exoskeleton is void of hydrocarbons and pheromones. It’s a flying carcass. How is this possible?
It flies low enough for me to see it has four wings, and at the ends of each wing is another wing that rotates from a central position through the air. It’s repugnant. Carcass roars and hovers above me. It’s terrifyingly close. Multiple legs appear from carcass’ stomach and rush toward me, wrap around my middle and pull me into the air. My feet are still attached to the sticky petal, which carcass yanks from the flower.
Carcass flies me across field, but I can’t see much below with the petal still stuck to my feet. I shiver, attempting to stay warm. When we finally stop, carcass drops me in a shallow pool of liquid that reaches my tibia. Instantly, the liquid dissolves the goo, freeing my feet from the petal but stripping my lower legs so they are hairless, raw and tender. I half-fly, half-stagger out of the liquid. Shivering and hungry, I look around. Carcass is gone. I’m enclosed on all sides by solid, transparent walls.
I crawl around, noting that beyond my enclosure is another larger enclosure. It takes me a while to realise it’s not cold; I am just hungry. I see other drones morosely sitting at the edges of the enclosure or huddled together. Some drones that smell vaguely like my hive make room for me, and my antennae touch theirs in familiar, comforting strokes. We are all scared, only they are also bored and listless. One drone leaves the huddle and returns sated. Curious, when another drone leaves, I follow him to a round puddle. He drinks. My antennae tell me it’s filled with a sort of nectar. I dip my proboscis into the puddle. It’s tasteless but familiar, like the nectaries on the white flower.
Belly full, the shock dissipates. A day rolls by. It’s boring like nothing: no wind, no flowers and certainly no queen pheromones. Distressingly, there’s no sun bee to warm us either, but six mini sun bees embedded in the flat roof of the larger enclosure emit cold white light. We all miss meadow.
***
Every day, more drones enter. Some, like me, are trapped on sticky white petals, and their legs become hairless and tender like mine when doused in liquid. One brother, whose old wings are torn and frayed, bangs his head against the glass again and again. Bee blood covers drone’s head and thorax, his jerking and grasping seem interminable. Carcass, emitting disgusting buzzing sounds, appears outside the enclosure and watches the drone fall to the ground.
In the morning, I touch drone’s exoskeleton; his oily layer is almost gone, his cadaverous eyes are motionless. Carcass watches. Is carcass always here? Always watching? A brother approaches me. We touch antennae but he doesn’t move away. He just stands opposite me, staring into my eyes. Slowly, I make a complicated pattern with my legs and wings, stretching them out five times, moving my front legs in the opposite direction to my back ones, varying the pitch and rhythm of my hum. He copies my exact movements. In turn, he takes flight, flies a figure-eight pattern twice, lands, hums a few short bursts and then stops. I fly the same pattern, land opposite him and copy the beat and number of his hums.
Cautiously, we touch antennae again and explore each other’s scent and pheromones. Like a brother, he is familiar, but he responds to my gestures immediately. I motion to carcass, ‘carcass,’ I sign.
‘Carcass,’ he repeats.
Our enclosure roof disappears, carcass flies above and scoops up the dead drone in one long limb that dangles from its belly.
‘Undertaker,’ drone signs.
‘Carcass and undertaker,’ I repeat.
We move about the enclosure, inventing new names for everything we see that doesn’t have one. We use our hums and body movements excitedly, trembling, jerking, stroking, stridulating and antennating. Drone is clever like me. We add clasper to our name because we clasper drones grasp things drones do not. We also note that carcass is still watching us.
The following day, more drones join us. Some catch on to the new language that clasper drone and I use. Drones that don’t are taken away by carcass.
Carcass drops different objects in our enclosure for us to explore. Some objects swivel, vibrate or light up when touched. When we touch objects in specific patterns, we get different-tasting nectar. The nectar is varied and delicious compared to the puddle nectar. It becomes a game amongst us clasper drones to see who figures out the object first. The brother that cracks it is hoisted up high and carried around on our backs. Soon, there are only clasper drones in the andron. One morning, there is also queen.
Queen looks us over; her strength and vigour awe me. Her pheromones are delicious. Even from a distance, we are crazy with lust. There are more clasper drones than I can count in the andron. Queen makes a long tooting sound followed by a string of pulses. We scramble to reach her first, crawling over each other, fighting. She backs herself into a corner. Her short pulses are like angry bolts of lightning. She lashes out at the first two clasper drones who approach, biting and piping at them.
We fall back. Still, I’m drawn to queen. I approach slowly and bow, making my thorax muscles ripple across my back. Her eyes are so sharp it almost hurts to look into them. I look away first and show her my endophallus. She pulses unimpressed. But when I look back, she has crouched down on all six limbs, positioning herself by resting on her front forelegs and middle legs, while her hind legs are bent behind, tibia pressed to the ground, sting extending. I need no other invitation. I’m less than half her size, so she barely budges when I climb onto her back, curve myself around her genital opening, attach my cornea claspers to her thorax and insert my phallus. I work fast. Her scent drives me wild. Even meadow’s glory is forgotten with this new sensation of being inside queen.
Soon, queen has my sperm. I clench my claspers tighter and pump a sticky mixture into her opening, which will harden and form a plug so no other sperm will enter. Queen has other ideas, ‘Little drone, release the cornea claspers, or I’ll crush you.’
Reluctant, I hesitate. Within seconds, I’m squished against the glass. I release my cornea claspers and slide off her back, crumbling at her feet.
Lust sated, terror fills my body faster than nectar rises in a flower’s pistil. Queens are violent, capricious creatures with sharp teeth at one end and a sting at the other. They kill their sisters at birth. I back away to where my brothers are watching. They hoist me onto their backs and carry me around the andron. Some have never before seen queen and didn’t understand the need for deference and flattery.
Scornfully, queen observes us. Another clasper drone approaches her carefully, slowly and at an angle so she can inspect him. He greets her in the same manner as me, head bowed, phallus displayed. She dismisses him but allows the next brother, who bows before her, to come close. Soon, she has what she came for. Tail swinging, sting poised, she walks to the middle of the andron and begins piping. Mellifluous pulses sound from her body. Her pheromones subdue even those shunned.
So complex and intelligent is queen, so quick and abundant are her antennae gestures and hums that I only understand half her message, but the gist is clear. More queens will follow. Satisfy them, and then we can return to meadow. The next bit is more confusing: our children will own meadow. My brothers look as confused as I am.
‘Children? Own?’ One clasper drone repeats.
Queen pipes angrily at his daring to question her, but she doesn’t bite him. Instead, she explains that we have been chosen. Our children will own meadow. Concepts like meadow and children are clear, but I don’t understand the word, own, but step forward, avoiding eye contact.
‘Why?’ I ask, ‘is queen so intelligent?’
To my surprise, she likes my question and touches my antennae with hers, stroking it as she speaks. I begin to shiver.
‘Artificial drones have selected you. Together, we make an intelligent future. It takes generations, but one day we will fight in human courts for meadow and seek damages for past poisonings.’
‘Humans are too big to fight,’ I counter, not understanding her but proud of my ability to antennate semi-articulately with queen.
‘In human court, one fights with intellect, not bodies,’ queen pauses, ‘human reign is over’, she adds. Her antennae release mine. I feel woozy from her touch and am still puzzling over all this when another drone steps forward with whom she hasn’t copulated. He asks a question about courts. Queen turns, swipes him impatiently with her tail and flies to the top of the enclosure, where she bats against a hatch. Carcass releases the hatch, and queen disappears somewhere inside the larger enclosure. I have never noticed this hatch before. When I try the hatch, nothing happens.
We clasper drones repeat queen’s gestures, trying out the new words and concepts and guessing at their meaning. Words like court and future feel strange. One brother suggests the future is a new kind of flower; another brother signs it’s where sun bee goes at night. We argue over what the term court means and eventually agree it’s a kind of meadow for humans. When one clasper drone signs humans have poison that makes us sick, no brother disagrees. We suspect courts are dangerous, but we are happy human reign is over and queen fights for meadow. We all want to go home to meadow.
***
Every second or third day, a new queen appears in the andron. They are super intelligent, articulate and aggressive, biting those who come too close and scarcely tolerating the presence of those they choose. With measured flattery and obeisance, we greet each queen coyly and compete for her attention. There is a clear tube that runs around the andron. Sometimes, we race with queen in the tube, and she allows the fastest to mate, but never for long. When we return to the andron, there are always fewer drones than before.
If we try to plug queen’s opening, she turns violent. Occasionally, queen answers our questions; her language is more complex than even clasper drones with our blossoming language can understand, yet we cling to her new words and concepts. We learn that many animals are bred for intelligence and compete in courts for meadow, field and forest. There are already intelligent fox skulks and hedgehog prickles who own fields. Many animals are now smart like humans. In court, humans are forced to share space and punished for poisoning spaces, but it makes me shiver when the queen signs there are intelligent songbirds, cuckoo bees, and spiders. Queen, soon bored with our questions, always leaves in a hurry. She flies toward the hatch, sting poised, lashing out with bites if we try to detain her.
We learn to pick our moments with queen. When one clasper drone has seduced her down to her tibias, her sting safely raised, he asks boldly, ‘Why make intelligent colonies?’
Queen lowers her sting. Clasper drone freezes and backs away a little but stops when the queen continues crouching and signs, ‘Poisoned hives make for empty cells and stupid workers. Mechanical drones have aligned with animals to counterbalance human reign.’
He looks confused. Queen loses interest in him, and I quickly step forward to woo her. She permits me to mount. I savour her wiggling beneath me, her antennae tuned to my pheromones. My copulative rhythmic hum culminates in the transfer of my sperm. Only afterwards, with cautious tweaks of my antennae, strict stridulation of my legs and concentrated hums, do I dare look at her and gesture, ‘Drones miss meadow. Which direction is home?’
Queen turns around to look at me. Her eyes are so bright they burn like sun bee. She raises one antenna and touches my antenna with hers. Her pheromones render me stupid. ‘Follow the artificial drone home.’ Her euphonious tooting makes my antennae weak and floppy, barely capable of gesturing further.
‘Artificial drone?’ I lamely repeat before my antenna collapses into hers, melting mutely into her scent. She gestures towards carcass, watching through the glass. ‘They forage and trap drones in meadow before selecting the cleverest drones for queens.’ I am still puzzling over her words when a younger brother approaches, and queen loses interest in me.
After the sixth or seventh queen, my phallus is shrivelled and exhausted. My fur is faded, and even my wings are frayed and sore from being bumped by queen in the flight tube or against the glass when I am too slow to let go. Very few clasper drones have the strength to woo her. A few approach queen and display themselves, but she is angry and scornful of her poor reception.
Afraid of her ferocious wrath, we huddle in the opposite corner, away from the unsatisfied queen. In full attack mode, she flies towards us, her furred roar bouncing angrily off the walls, ‘Exit the andron,’ she stridulates shrilly, and we drones huddle tighter, braced for her revenge. At the last second, she swoops up and shoots into the flight tube. Any able clasper drone follows her, and the rest of us hum and antennate with relief. We return to our flavourless nectar puddle, gorging our bellies to redress our humiliation.
Only our respite doesn’t last. The roof of our enclosure disappears. Carcass flies in, chasing us into the air, emitting a hideous hum that reverberates through our bodies, frightening us. Poop pours down my hind legs. Terrified, I fly out of the andron into the larger enclosure, circling the space in panic.
Carcass’ roaring buzz makes my antennae and legs ache. I notice an opening in the wall I have never seen before. Its sides are straight, and the interior is so bright it shocks my eyes. Carcass herds us clasper drones through the luminous hole. We fly blinded by the light. Before my eyes can adjust, sun bee greets me, warming my muscles through my thin fur, sending flickers of hope across my thorax, legs, and wings. I’m outside. I’m free. We clasper drones rise high in the sky. Less confused now, I see carcass flying across field and orientate myself.
‘Follow me,’ I sign to my brothers, ‘I know the way home.’