15: Pollen Storm

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Tyk doesn’t have time to worry about Smon right now. The hive needs her more. If Smon does anything particularly alarming, the pair guarding her egg will let the hive know; until then, there’s work to be done.

Tyk has been in cave-ins before, and knows that the last thing that one should do is dart about like a light-confused riverfly. She looks about for a coordinator and spies Hetta, standing on top of the hive entrance and easily visible, her astounding array of carapace jewels glittering and drawing the eye. Of course the most distinguished coordinator in the hive would come up for a crisis like this.

Tyk heads over. “What needs doing?”

“You are fit and able?”

“Yes.”

“The afflicted are fine, but most of them are too incapacitated as yet to speak or move much. Those who have a truesister or close friend or family member present to tend them are being dealt with, but some of them have truesisters down in the deep tunnels who don’t know of this yet. We don’t want to stop tunnel work for a temporary and non-threatening situation but we can’t leave them untended, and night will fall before their truesisters get back. So I need you to go around and pick up any men who are sufficiently clean of pollen and move them into group chamber two.”

Group chamber two? Why that one?

Tyk doesn’t ask, of course. She’s been given a job, and she gets to doing it. Bring the incapacitated people inside before it gets dark, into a big room where they can all be looked after until they either recover or a family member comes for them. And that room is group chamber two. So.

Ketan lies at her feet, looking blearily up at her. His wings wobble weakly, not a full flutter, like a newly hatched larva figuring out his own body. Tyk knows Ketan; he’s not much younger than her, and an adventurous sort, so when she’d run off exploring as a younger child, he’d sometimes run off with her, later using the excuse to Tan that he was ‘looking out for a hive member, making sure she didn’t get hurt or lost’. Tan never gave him or Tyk more than a token badgering about it, so Tyk supposed that she didn’t mind all that much.

Boys mature a lot faster than girls. His wings are fully coloured (sixth stripe is the same colour as Kepol’s third stripe; Tan and Tyk are related, which Tyk already knows but is always interesting to see), so he’s old enough to have been working at the very top of the tower, at the altitude where these kinds of storms occur.

“Tyk?” He manages to say.

“You’re fine, everything’s going to be okay.” She checks him over, and determined that he’s neither injured, nor so heavily coated in pollen that moving him through the tunnels is likely to cause a problem. “Let’s get you inside.” She considers, briefly, ‘accidentally’ breathing in enough of the pollen to put herself under for a little while. Why does everything have to happen at once? Yeahs of no problems, and then the sky people, and helping Smon, and the wingsong streams getting interrupted right now, of all times? This cannot be a coincidence. Not with that timing.

Smon had mentioned the possibility of the sky people being a danger to the Earth people. Is this what she had meant?

One problem at a time. Tyk lifts Tan as gently as she can, careful of his wings (he’s not awake or coordinated enough to sit on her horns, making this a delicate operation), and carried him into the hive.

Group room two is already half-full of intoxicated patients. A couple of them have the strength and dexterity to sit on the perches lining the walls, but most of them lie limply on soft pallets of woven grass on the floor. Such pallets have fairly limited uses, and Tyk is surprised that the hive even has so many. There certainly hasn’t been time to weave them as a response to this specific disaster.

A couple of doctors flit about the room, their wings bright and clear in contrast to the dull pollen-coated wings of their patients. The room is too crowded with patients for women to move about easily; the female doctors are presumably up on the surface, helping to tend and carry. Tyk hands Tan over to a doctor, and goes to exit the tunnel, to get out of everyone’s way and find another patient to carry down.

The group rooms aren’t usually used for this sort of thing. Their main purpose is to house visitors or traders or anyone else who, for whatever reason, either cannot have an individual residential chamber or would find one impractical. Sometimes, people use them to hold meetings. So far as rooms go, group room 2 is a good sheltered place to stick a whole lot of people who require a small amount of supervision if you want their families to be able to find them fast without having to check a whole lot of individual rooms and want to give them a bit more dignity and privacy than dumping them all in the middle of the entrance chamber.

It’s filling up fast, though. Soon, they’ll have to move on to group room one, or three.

Tyk’s deep in thought enough that as she turns away from the room, she almost runs right under Bette, who seems to be delivering food and water to the group room. “Tyk! Are you alright?”

“Yes. Sorry, didn’t look where I was going.”

“Thinking about Aleni?”

“No!” Tyk doesn’t have time to think about her grandmother. There are too many other things going on in the here and now to dwell on the past. Besides, she can’t get waylaid by thoughts of Aleni every time she happens to look inside group room two. She can’t think about the old woman sadly hunched at the far end of the room, gems dull under a layer of dust. (Bette’s own gems are looking dull again; how is Kebette? He’s not sick, is he? Going blind?) Right now, group room two is full of other people, and if any of them die, someone else is going to be in Aleni’s position. That’s more important than the dead.

“We were friends, you know, when we were children,” Bette says, as if Tyk hadn’t spoken. “Oh, and I could tell you about Keleni, I could.”

Tyk isn’t particularly in the mood to hear about her grandfather, either. His death, at least, had been quick and clean. “They both sound great, Bette. I need to help haul all these people underground before dark.”

“Oh, there’s no rush on that; there’s a lot of backs out there doing a fairly small job,” Bette says, but stands aside and lets Tyk go. Tyk dips her mandibles briefly in thanks and heads back out.

Bette isn’t wrong; moving the men inside is relatively quick work between so many people. She checks the patients for Kesan and Kedahm, knowing that their truesisters are busy down in the tunnels today, but neither were affected. It’s still light when they get them all inside and Tyk takes one final look around for anything (or anyone) left behind, only for Kesyn to land on a perch jutting out of the tower, directly next to her.

“Tyk,” he says.

It’s still unnerving, having the hiveheart know her. “Y-yes?”

“Where’s the star?”

Not a star, but that’s not a good conversation to have without Smon present, if it can be avoided. “Back at her egg.” If Tyk goes to get her now, she’ll be walking back in the dark, but she’s travelled in the dark before; that’s not a problem. “I could go get her?”

“No, it can wait until tomorrow.”

“Is this about the wingsong stream?”

“She’s told you something?”

“No. It’s just… a bit much to be a coincidence.”

“Yeah. The singers all think the same.” He flutters his wings, agitated. “There’s been some minor instability since the stars fell, but that’s not too unusual. But there shouldn’t be any pollen pools anywhere close enough to be blown on our tower, not without notice. The fact that this caught us by surprise means that something very drastic happened, and it happened very quickly. The fact that it came so soon after the starfall… well. See if your charge knows anything. We’ll have to coordinate with the other towers as soon as the wingsong flow settles again.”

“How long will that be?”

“I have no idea. If I understood this, I would’ve predicted it.” The master singer takes off and flies back up the tower. Tyk stares after him.

Then he drops back down. “Oh, and tell her that we finally got reports from the more distant hives before we lost communication. We’ve found nineteen living baby gods so far.”

And he takes off again.

Nineteen. Well, that’s better than fourteen. Tyk will have to ask Smon how many sky people fell. And Kesyn doesn’t know how long it’ll be before the wingsong stream settles back into its normal currents.

If it settles back into its normal currents.

Permanent changes in the wingsong stream are very rare, but not impossible. And Tyk might not know a whole lot about the stream, but she understands equilibria. If you push a system out of balance, it pushed back, it recovers – usually. But if it’s pushed wrong, or pushed beyond the point of recovery, it might just settle into something new. You cut the bamboo at the end of the dry season and the rain collects in the cut-off stems and soaks the soil and the dead stems rot and they feed and water the life below which feeds the bamboo, so it grows back and heals over the damage you did. If you cut all the bamboo, there’s nothing to reseed the area and the ground is colonised by low grasses which can’t hold moisture in the soil during the dry season, so the ground dries out more and the bamboo can’t regain a foothold, and it’s a plain of lowgrass from then on. If you want bamboo again, you have to put a lot of time and effort into pushing the environment back the other way – its new stable state is as a plain of lowgrass.

The sleeplands are the same thing. People come into a rich land and build hives and dig out huge tunnels for living and farming and digging out sweetroot. Until the sweetroot is gone, all eaten or rotted in the ground, and the previously packed soil is riddled with holes and full of waste matter, and the whole environment can’t sustain itself any more, so it becomes something else; a place sparse in food and safety, that can’t support hives, so everybody leaves and the dormant sweetroots grow in the rich aerated soil and the various bugs and crabs make use of the vacated tunnels, a new system that lasts until the rotting farms are all depleted and the unmaintained tunnels have collapsed into hard, packed earth once more, and the sweetroot fall dormant once again and the crab populations crash and it’s time for people to return and restore the old equilibrium.

So far as Tyk understands it, the wingsong stream is more like the river than the ground, although even that isn’t completely accurate, as a great many things live out complex lives in the river whereas the wingsong stream is used mostly for life to communicate or disperse pollen. It’s affected by permanent fixtures, like high mountains, and changeable things, like the weather, but it hardly has the complexity of an ecosystem. Tyk doesn’t know if that makes it harder or easier to change. She does know that if even the singers, if even the master singer himself, doesn’t know what’s happening… well, that’s a bad sign.

And she remembers Smon’s reaction to seeing the fallen men. One look at them, and she’d turned and fled the scene. Right after that ominous conversation about her people possibly being a danger to Tyk’s.

Smon knows what’s going on. And in the morning, Tyk is going to get to the bottom of this.

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