Disclaimer: The characters, except for the bees, are drawn from Marvel Comics and belong to them. The Shadowlands are Alicia McKenzie's alternate universe based on Marvel's books, and Oasis is her own peculiar section thereof where she is pursuing a plot, which she has kindly permitted me to contribute to. The bees are in fact hers. No profit is being made from the story except for the experience and enjoyment of writing it and, I hope, reading it and any response it may evoke.
Note: I will not try to explain where this falls in relationship to other specific Oasis stories, except that it's relatively early. There are several, and there will be more, and this is before all the posted ones I know about -- but that will presumably change soon. Chronological relationships can probably be figured out by reading enough of the stories; eventually there may or may not be a timeline. Visit the Shadowlands Archive for Alicia's full collection of shift-fic.
Hive Mind
by Persephone
"I think the plants look depressed."
Nathan had wandered out of the World's End Bar -- still thought that was an awful name -- in search of fresh air and somewhere to stretch his legs. He was starting to get restless. What he had found was Franklin, staring out over the garden.
And, apparently, speculating on the psychological state of the plants.
"Do they?" If they were, he couldn't really distinguish it from the worry/relief/confusion/busyness/tension that tended to underlie Oasis all the time.
"I don't know. Something like that." Franklin sighed.
Nathan looked at the boy's shoulders and tried not to think of a young Scott trying to take responsibility for the whole team, the whole world -- he could wish he hadn't started keeping an eye on his world's X-Men so soon.
"The crops aren't doing all that well, no matter what I do. We need more produce...." He rose from his folded-up sitting position on the grass and looked seriously at Nathan. "I think we need pollinators."
"...And I'm supposed to go find them, right?"
Franklin gave him a wry smile. "Well, I thought maybe you could keep it in mind next time you're out."
"I'll see what I can do."
Now how was he supposed to carry bees back to Oasis?
*****
"Dom?"
"Hm?"
"There's a bee on that flower."
It was a very nice shift, really. Not too broken up. The plants were still doing their thing, and, apparently, so were the bees.
"That's nice. Just don't sit on it."
"I was thinking about following it."
"*Huh*?"
"Franklin was talking about needing pollinators. If we could follow this bee back to her hive, maybe...."
He glanced quickly at Domino as she came over beside him to look at the bee. She should like it. It was... purple.
Actually, it was sort of mauve.
And it was looking back at them.
Feeling slightly idiotic, Nathan reached out telepathically to it and said, "Hi."
It didn't feel the way he was expecting. Not like most insects. This felt... sharper, and almost dizzyingly multifaceted, an actual consciousness -- but multiple, and all focused back to the hive and its center, the queen. To his further shock, he received an answer that might as well have been in words.
The returned greeting buzzed in his head with wary suspicion. \Hello.\
Nathan blinked and shook his head, then looked at the bee again. She was looking back up at him with a startlingly alert expression.
Impatience, the feeling of waiting for the giant dumb mammal to communicate again. \Well?\
He looked at Dom for a second. "It talks."
Dom gave him a long worried look, then carefully put her hand to his forehead -- slowly, as if she thought she might spook him -- to check for fever. "Great. Ask it where home is."
He might as well....
"Ah -- we'd like to know where you live. We've been looking for some bees."
Instant stronger suspicion. No wonder, either.
Hastily, he added, "We know of some plants that could really use your attention."
The bee and the mass consciousness behind it seemed slightly mollified, or at least to consider the possibility that he wasn't just after their honey.
Of course, it might have helped if the bee-thought of honey weren't quite so possessive, vivid, and overwhelmingly sweet that it made his mouth water. He could almost smell it.
The answer came decisively, but with cautious reserve. \Tell us.\ There was a stronger, slightly more individual "voice" now, experienced and sure of itself and its right to speak for the hive. The queen was talking to him now, not just the worker still buzzing in short hops from flower to flower.
Nathan decided this was probably a good thing.
Now if he'd only thought of the possibility of encountering sentient bees, and prepared a sales pitch.
"All right." He kept speaking aloud, even though the conversation was really being carried on telepathically -- somehow all the emotions and imagery in it seemed to be by scent -- and he vaguely seemed to remember encountering the information somewhere that bees didn't hear well. On the other hand, they didn't usually talk to humans, either, so he wasn't ruling anything out.
"There's a place called the Oasis. It's -- kind of like a hive for humans -- but the shifts don't come there. Franklin prevents it." Would the bees even know what the shifts were, if their hive hadn't encountered them? They had to lose workers sometimes to other hazards. Granted, the consciousness was a literal hive-mind, so perhaps they'd be aware of whatever happened....
He felt Domino quest along their link and then settle cautiously into his mind, seeming rather surprised when the queen spoke up again.
\We are aware of how humans settle together,\ he was told noncommittally.
"Good. Well, we grow crops there for food -- but most of them have to be pollinated, and we can't do that as well as you could." Well, that took care of explaining Oasis's self-interest in the bargain; now for what was in it for the bees. "There are no shifts there, like I said, as long as you stay inside the boundary. Since Franklin controls the weather, he can make the growing season constant, so there'll always be flowers for you."
That did catch her (their?) interest. He seemed to smell flowers and something vaguely citrusy. \Flowers. All the time?\
"Yes. There's no real winter; something's always blooming." What kind of flowers did bees like? "There are... ah... apples, and clover...." Not much clover, though. "A lot of fruits. Vegetables. Cucumbers. Peaches. Things like that."
\We don't like cucumbers.\ Scorn, and a feeling of irritated tiredness. Blast. He got enough of THAT on his own. \Appleblossom may be a possibility, however.\ Better....
"It would be good for both of us," he tried. "We'd have more food. You'd have reliable supplies of nectar and pollen, and your hive would be safe."
\That is what we doubt.\ What was THAT almost-smell -- cheap vodka? Old bananas?
#Nail polish remover?# Dom suggested brightly.
Sort of like acetone, she was right.
Somehow that was not what he'd ever expected fear or hostility to smell like. He'd have to ask the next Logan he saw.
"We don't want to harm any of you," he tried.
\You would steal our brood and honey.\
"We would not. Well, I admit the honey would be tempting." They didn't have to make it sound so GOOD, either.... "But we'd be providing the plants you got the nectar from."
\You need them anyway.\
"You could at least talk to Franklin. Maybe he could arrange for some extra plants just to make more nectar. Or we could just stick with the pollination."
\This Franklin is your leader?\ "Your leader" seemed to mean "queen of your hive" except that there was a conscious effort to convey that while this individual might coordinate the humans' activities, the queen bee was aware it wasn't the same function or social situation.
"Yes. Look. I can't get in touch with him from here, and he can't leave Oasis." He got the feeling the bees understood that. "But if you'll let me take you to see him I promise that you'll have a good place to live if you want to stay, and if not, I'll bring you right back here."
There was a pause, and a vague sense of being chivvied about. And slight hunger from the queen, but something resembling satiation from the satellite-minds of the workers. Nathan was still puzzling over that when the queen finally replied, \If we can be certain you will not harm our hive, you may follow the worker beside you and some of us will see this hive-site.\
Startled, he nearly missed the mauve worker's lift-off. She paused and buzzed irritably around his head, then took off in -- he couldn't help it -- a bee-line. "They'll come with us, Dom. Come on!"
"This might actually be the weirdest thing you've ever had me chasing, you know that, Nate?"
*****
Several minutes later, they were standing in front of a rockface as the bee dived into a small hole. Nathan was getting a strong sense of home warmth dark sweet family *home* -- and having to leave. The intensity was such that he was starting to feel guilty about having asked at all.
Then the queen bee laughed at him.
\It is time to swarm. We're becoming crowded. I must leave anyway, before the new queen emerges, or we would not have agreed to come with you. The workers are already drinking honey to prepare for the journey.\
He could smell the hive from here, honey and wax and what he could only assume were the queen's pheromones -- although he was probably getting that through telepathy with the bees again -- and that citrus smell he still couldn't quite figure out.
"Oh. All right."
\How far is the hive-site you want us to look at?\
That was a really good question. "Quite a distance. I can carry you, though... except I'm not sure what *in*...." He really should have brought something.
\We can hold on.\
"To what?"
\You, of course.\
Several bees began emerging from the same hole in the rockface, all that strange mauve color, though some were in different shades and some had slightly more pronounced stripes of light and dark. One, the largest one, he immediately identified as the queen who had been talking to him. She flew over, a bit less agilely than her workers, and -- to his considerable surprise -- settled on his right shoulder.
The workers who had nudged her out the opening followed and settled beside her, still flapping their wings. More appeared at the edge of the rocky hole and took off, all heading unerringly for him and joining the collection on his shoulder. Some began to spread down his arm.
The citrus smell kept getting stronger. Apparently it was guiding them....
It was guiding a *lot* of them. The buzzing grew louder as more and more bees poured out of the cliff in a steady stream and immediately toward him and their queen.
"Man, Nate." Domino had taken a couple of steps back from him, but was half doubled over with laughter. "The girls are just all over you, aren't they?"
This was not quite accurate, but it was getting there. Several thousand bees by this point adorned Nathan's shoulder, arm, and half his side.
They were still coming.
He shot Dom a slightly hunted look and addressed the bees again. "Could you maybe get off the inside of my arm? I'd like to be able to move it without squashing you." He wasn't sure this would get the idea across, but the mass almost immediately cleared his side and enough of his arm that he could actually move it safely.
On the other hand, they started spreading across his chest and back onto his pack.
Well, he supposed they had to be somewhere.
The river of insects finally stopped -- he was slightly surprised not to have been stung at some point -- and he ventured a question. "Just how many of you ARE there?"
That was a difficult one, but the quantity sorted itself out without too much trouble. \About twenty thousand or so. You *will* have space for us?\
He looked down at himself. "I think we can manage."
It was a very interesting trip back to Oasis. A lot of the bees were airborne at any given time while they were on the move, but the queen stayed on his shoulder -- except for a few times when he gently set her down during a meal or so he could hug Dom -- and the workers had no intention of losing track of her.
They still sent out scouts, despite his promise of a new hive-site; he wound up attempting negotiations with another hive, on the theory that two wouldn't be too many and the queen's strong approval of the idea of having drones that weren't her own offspring available next time her daughters raised up a new queen.
This one wasn't swarming, and was more suspicious and less enthusiastic, apparently suspecting him to be some sort of devious plot by the other colony to open them up to robbers. They did have a corner of their hive cavity missing to a shift, though, so he succeeded in persuading them to consider letting him come back and bring them AND their comb back -- assuming he could find them again -- if the ones he was carrying decided Oasis was a rich enough location.
He suspected he might get sent back for the other half of the hive whose swarm was sitting on him, too.
It was also the scout bees who found and brought him word of the dark-haired young boy curled tightly in exhausted sleep among the roots of a jelly-like tree that was nevertheless the closest thing to solid in a thin, murky swamp.
Nathan was exhausted from trying to swim or TK his and Dom's way through it by the time they reached the quivery trunk and the squishy but at least thicker muck its roots held together, but the child was alive and apparently healthy, though thin and in sore need of a bath.
He was also Mikhail Rasputin.
Nathan couldn't quite figure out why he hadn't sensed a member of the Twelve until practically on top of him, but there frequently didn't seem to be any good reason for what did or didn't work in the shifts. He sighed, and told himself "The why of any situation is secondary to the situation itself" and "What is, is," to Dom's great annoyance, and then tried gently to shake the child awake.
It didn't work.
"Should we wait or just take him and go?"
"I don't know. I don't like being out here longer than we have to, but --" Dom cast a troubled glance at a sky which was distinguishable from the swamp itself only because it was above them and, presumably, gaseous. "If there's anyone near here that he was looking for, or who was helping him, I'd hate to leave them...."
"There's only me." The words were in a thin, high voice -- in Russian.
They both jumped and looked up, startled, into the tree, where a similarly scrawny blonde girl who couldn't have been more than nine sat perched improbably in the sag of a fork.
"Illyana?!" Nathan asked in astonishment.
She kicked one foot, swinging it but not letting it strike hard against the tree. Her heel still made a tiny dent. "Yes. He doesn't know who I am. I mean, I told him, but he's too young for me to have been born yet. I try to take care of him. Who are you?"
They gave their names, which obviously meant nothing to her. She climbed down, though, with a small splat and a squish, when Mikhail chose that time to wake up and call questioningly for her. He didn't seem alarmed at the strangers, more interested -- and fascinated with the purple bees.
"I never saw bees that color."
"Neither had we." Nathan considered carefully, then fingered as delicately as he could left-handed into the cluster on his shoulder. "If you'd climb onto my finger, my lady...."
\Very well. But he must be gentle.\
After appropriate cautions, the queen stepped with dignity onto a much smaller finger and permitted her rather agitated workers to start joining her again. Mikhail watched with round-eyed delight as the swarm slowly transferred itself to him.
Nathan decided to let him keep them while they started for the next shift -- though this made for some careful maneuvering when they reached the line and discovered that they had to *climb* through on account of a difference of about three feet in the levels of their feet and the upcoming solid ground. Nathan wound up having to take the swarm back, eventually. There was more room on him, and he didn't want to lose half the bees going through a shiftline.
He was unutterably relieved when they made it to the calm moat surrounding Oasis with few and almost stationary shift-lines -- even if there were several nasty ones converging on them from behind. The bees all set up a humming as he walked through the shield, and Franklin openly stared when he came to meet them.
"Somehow, that's just not --" he reached up to touch Nate's head, as if in benediction, to purge the shift-madness "-- how I expected you to bring us back bees."
"They might not stay. They want to talk to you."
"Talk to me?" Franklin crouched to give the children a warm smile and welcome, and incidentally cleanse Mikhail as well.
"They're sentient. I'm serious." Nathan nearly went cross-eyed craning to see the queen on his own shoulder. "*She* says she wants to discuss terms of a treaty."
*****
This, Franklin reflected, was new.
For one thing, he was talking to several thousands of bees, and they were talking back, or at least the queen was. Even if she was the only one who said "I," however, she also seemed to speak for them all.
For another thing, none of the other inhabitants of Oasis had ever demanded a treaty when they came in.
He hoped this wasn't going to be a regular thing; it could get complicated. At least he could claim this didn't count as a precedent because no one else was likely to come in blocks of twenty-some thousand of a different species. At least, he sincerely hoped not.
Others might arrive clinging to Nathan, theoretically, but probably not quite the same way.
Mikhail was SO much simpler to deal with....
"I'm sorry to seem so unprepared, but I'm not from a timeline with many sentient insects, at least not that I've met."
\Think nothing of it. We don't converse often with mammals either.\
Great....
"What kind of terms is it you're talking about, exactly? Essentially, from our side, we want a better food supply -- which means your pollinating our crops. We're offering you protection from the shifts and a reliable food supply going along with the pollination -- I'm trying to keep crops coming in all the time, which also means plants blooming all the time."
\We want this guaranteed. We want the safety of our hive guaranteed.\
"Easy enough."
\Is it?\
"Why not?"
\Mammals usually would try to tear it apart to rob us.\
Franklin took a deep breath and tried to be delicate about this. "We *would* like to be able to get some honey out of this, if possible. We can build hives so that this doesn't have to destroy the whole thing."
\You do want to rob us then.\ He smelled overripe bananas. This was really strange, considering there were to the best of his knowledge no bananas in Oasis at all. It was also making him hungry, even though the bees felt annoyed. \We store honey to last the winter!\
"There's no winter here," Franklin countered.
He could feel the bees thinking about this.
"We won't harm your brood, at all. But we're providing shelter and *your* food, and I think you'll find there's more than enough nectar here for your needs." At least he hoped so. There were bees flying from Nathan's arm and shoulder to the garden and back again, apparently with news. With any luck at all it would be a good report....
\Show us the hive-site,\ the queen demanded abruptly.
He was being ordered around by a bug.
Well, he wasn't quite as unprepared for this. He'd assumed Nathan and Domino would find some bees eventually, once he mentioned it. It wasn't as if bees were likely to go especially crazy, or exert the kind of control over the shifts that members of the Twelve could apparently use to fight back and elude the searchers.
So he'd found somebody who knew what a beehive was supposed to be like and somebody else decent at carpentry, and used some of their store of wood to make a couple of box-things that were apparently the latest thing in beekeeping. Or, to refrain from exaggeration, at least the best sort of hive they knew about.
Too bad they didn't have wax, according to his first advisor on the topic, but maybe if the queen got too stubborn he'd try making some out of thin air. It might even impress her.
"That I can do. Right this way...."
More bees went to investigate the box, went in and out, buzzed around for a while, and came back.
The ones returning from the garden landed on their sisters and walked around in apparent agitation. Franklin hushed, since the hive's attention was obviously on them. Whatever they were saying smelled of flowers.
\Are you promising that this supply of nectar and pollen would be constant?\
"I'll promise that this is lower than usual, if you'll share the honey with us." He wasn't quite sure that would interest them, since making more honey than they could eat would just be more work and he was insisting that the surplus would be unnecessary... but perhaps they still had enough of the instinct to build up an extra supply that they'd do it anyway.
\We would need water near the hive, with things to climb out on if we fall in.\
"Easy to do. Water's not generally a problem here, and we have basins. I'll get that." It sounded like they were agreeing....
\No one should come near our hive to damage it, or try to hurt us when we forage.\
"I can't promise that no one will get nervous and swat at you, or hurt one of you by accident. But hurting other residents of Oasis isn't allowed, and if *you* promise that none of you will go stinging people if they aren't actually attacking you -- or flying around them to try to scare them -- then I'll promise that I'll warn everyone to watch out for you and not hurt you."
\That... will have to be good enough. Very well. If you will, as you say, protect our hive from weather, shifts, and predators, and make certain there is always ample food and water, then we will pollinate your crops.\
"And share honey with us? And wax?"
\You never mentioned wax before. That takes even more effort than honey!\
"But the pollination is a side effect of your gathering food, which you'd want to do anyway. We're putting a lot into this too." He held his breath. This was ridiculous....
\If you will add plants that are grown entirely or mostly for their nectar. And if you will *never* use smoke when you open our hive, but give fair warning and let us choose the time. And NEVER hurt our brood!\
"I'll promise all of that, but you also have to agree that you won't go putting brood on every comb just to make sure that we can't take honey or wax *without* hurting your brood."
Was he imagining a startled and somewhat grudging increase in respect? \Very well. But we will share wax only if you provide us some to begin.\
"I'll do my best. *And* I'll keep you free of disease and pests to the best of my ability."
\One more condition.\
Now what? Maybe he shouldn't have thrown in something they hadn't asked for, though he'd have done it anyway.
"What is it?"
\No insecticides. Ever!\
He almost laughed. "No insecticides. Ever. You'll agree then?"
Bees started pouring off Cable and into the box with a startling feeling of triumph. Franklin closed his eyes and dragged the molecular structure (as best he could remember it) and all the properties of beeswax to mind, and started building it with all the attention he could spare. He was rewarded with a decidedly pleased orange odor as the bees encountered it, and stole the right structure for a honeycomb out of their minds (mind?) to guide the rest of his work.
\You will make it easy for us to find all we need and forbid other robbers from our hive, in return for the fruit of our feeding on your plants.\ The Queen's thought was very waxy and smelled warm and sweet as she poked her head into a new-formed cell. \We will stay, and we will share.\