17: A New Hive

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Slowly, haltingly, nervously, and with Tyk’s help, Smon tells her story to the hiveheart. The room is crowded, with Tyk and her two parents and Smon all crammed in with the hiveheart itself, and Smon’s nervousness isn’t helping Tyk feel calm. The hiveheart, by contrast, listen with calm interest.

“Fascinating,” says Kerial, the master stargazer. “So there are other Earths, far away.”

“You don’t need to look so happy about it,” Kepat says. “Do you realise how much lore is going to need to be rewritten based on this?”

“A lot less than would’ve had to be rewritten if we were escorting baby stars themselves,” Hetta points out. “The nature of stars remains unchanged this way.”

“She just told us that Tahku is a sedentary star!” Kepat snaps, agitated. In fact, Tyk realises, people in the room aren’t calm; they’re just good actors. The men, when she looks closely, all look a bit agitated.

This is a bigger revelation for them than for her, she realises. Tahku, the sun, is the man’s god, the one who oversees all of their hatchings.

“Which is fascinating,” Kerial says. “If all the sedentary stars are the size of Tahku, then how far away must they be? I’ll need to do some calculations. And they all have their sentinels, Smon?”

“Some have sentinel, some no. Different number sentinel.”

“How many does yours have?”

“Eight sentinel, including Smon Earth.”

Eight. A perfect number. Significant? Probably not.

“So seven sentinels and an Earth,” Kepat corrects firmly. Which is a reasonable correction, Tyk thinks. The Earth moves like a sentinel but it’s obviously different; Even Smon admitted that much, when she’d explained that she couldn’t just land and live on any old sentinel. It had to be one of the rare precious few Earths, the zones that give life.

“Yes,” Smon says. After a moment’s hesitation, she continues, “Also. Some sentinels and Earths, have own small sentinels. That circle them like Earths and big sentinels circle suns.”

That tidbit is what pushes the hive’s master lorekeeper from agitated to fascinated. Kepat’s wings hum low, almost too low for Tyk to hear. “Sentinels of Earths? Now that’s cosmologically fascinating. I wonder what influence that has on dictating the fates of those Earth’s inhabitants? If they’re so close… then again, Arnu and Kelennin are very close, and not necessarily more influential than the stars. This will need discussion once the wingsong stream is back up.”

“That’s great for lorekeepers,” Lian says, “but for the moment, we have a more pressing issue. Notably, what are we going to do with these people? There’s no particular reason to make the journey to the Starspire, but we have to gather them somewhere. I assume you intend to meet up with the rest of your people, Smon?”

“Yes. Smon people need other Smon people. Need work together.”

“Of course you do,” Hetta says. “Nobody can build a hive alone. You are welcome at Redstone River, of course, but the biological differences between our people and yours make it a far more practical option for you to establish a hive together.”

Lian flicks her mandibles in assent. “If they need their own separate types of farms, it makes no sense for a whole lot of hives to individually set them up for one to three people when they can simply all get together and build just one. Yes, gathering them at the safest and closest location and finding them a spot to build a hive is the best move forward.”

“Not to mention medicine,” says Pana, one of the hiveheart members elected by the populace. “If Smon were to get badly hurt, none of us would know what to do.”

Tyk thinks about the pollen storm, and Smon being convinced that some kind of ‘small life’ from her Earth had made everyone sick. She wonders if there’s anything on their Earth that can make Smon sick in some way that none of them can predict.

“Then we’re in agreement,” Hetta says. “As soon as we can communicate once more on the wingsong, we share this information with the other hives and start looking for a new hive site for these new people.”

“That’ll be difficult,” Kepat says. “The continent’s very crowded already.”

“That is true. Hmm. Perhaps, we might need to merge – ”

“Nobody’s going to merge hives to make room for a tiny new hive, even a hive of people from the sky.”

“I meant merge their new hive with an existing hive. That might be doable.”

“Yeah, probably, but the political – ”

“Um,” Tyk cuts in shyly. “Putting them close to another hive is probably the best move regardless, but the continent’s not crowded. There’s plenty of places for the people from the sky to make a hive.”

“No, there isn’t,” Kepat says with an indulgent little hum of his wings, falling into the mode of explaining something simple to a child. “There may very well be places far over patches of sleeplands, but the safest place to reach by going over the sleeplands is already Starspire, and we’re looking for a shorter and safer journey. There aren’t any places for a new hive without travelling over the sleeplands.”

“Yes, there are,” Tyk says, trying to keep her tone respectful. “There’s vast tracts of unburrowed and unharvested land between the hives. We can’t put hives there, because they’re in wingsong stream dead zones or they don’t have enough sweetroot. But Smon’s people don’t need sweetroot and they don’t use the wingsong stream. Knowing where best to put them will mean figuring out what they need; or, more simply, getting them together and just asking them. I’m sure there will be plenty of places that have what they need, and we won’t be there, because it isn’t what we need.”

An awkward moment of silence descends and Tyk realises, with equal measures of shame and satisfaction, that she did just rather rudely embarrass the entire hiveheart by pointing out something that she had thought perfectly obvious. But it makes sense; the hiveheart is made of those most devoted and useful to managing a hive. The fourteen people who decide these things think in terms of hives, which means thinking in terms of communication points and sweetroot and water availability and soil quality for burrowing. Anywhere that a hive can’t be built is simply not a place they habitually think about, unless something happens there to delay traders. To point out that Smon’s people could have a hive without the wingsong is as nonsensical at to suggest that they could live on the ocean.

Actually, that might be worth asking. Tyk hasn’t had any confirmation that Smon can’t live on the ocean.

“That is a point,” Hetta says finally. “Then the wingsong stream is usable again, we’ll have to consult with the other hives on this. In the meantime, Smon, we’ll arrange for some loregatherers to talk to you about your people’s hives, what sorts of things you need and what locations are best. The other hives can’t be that far off reaching the same conclusions as us, so if we’re lucky then once we re-establish contact, we’ll have information from a lot of sky people and can choose a good location. Also, I’m sure you’re already accounting for this since the plan was to go to Starspire, but – be prepared to travel.”

“Yes.”

“As for the rest of us, we need to start preparing for a possible disruption in trade if this silence goes on for too long. If traders don’t know what’s needed and can’t contact their families at the end of their journeys, a lot of them aren’t going to move, and they’re not going to be able to tell us that. If traders from our hive come home, we have no idea what they’ll bring with them. We should act under the assumption of no trade, to be safe.”

“Could it really be down for that long?” Pana asks. “Kesyn?”

The master singer flicks his wings. “Hard to say. We have no information to predict how long this will go on for. A day, a season; there’s no way to tell. Are you sure you have no imformation, Smon?”

She rocks her head ‘no’. “Smon Earth not have wingsong stream. Haidn is… air… lorekeeper… Haidn might be able to say, but Smon not air lorekeeper. Smon rock lorekeeper.”

A rock lorekeeper? What does that mean?

“Haidn? One of the guests at the Green Hills Hive?”

“Yes.”

“Well at least somebody might know what’s going on then,” Lian grumbles. “Maybe we can ask her about it when this is over.”

The meeting breaks up, and the hive gets to work. Redstone River is not a heavily trade-dependent hive, which is both a blessing and a curse; they can survive a long sleep in trade with relative ease, yes, but it’s also much more likely that such a sleep will occur. If they were constantly trading critical supplies with nearby hives in stable amounts, then the trade routes would have to continue to operate (and with them, there would be very slow, very clumsy communication). But Redstone River’s trade needs are variable and small, and that lack of consistency might bite them if the lack of wingsong persist long-term. In theory, if the wingsong stream takes a long time to recover or even – stars dim at the thought – reaches a new equilibrium, the next time that Redstone River sees a trader could very well be when the traders need them – they have access tot he strongest, lightest bamboo in the area, and with it, they build the best carts.

And the strongest, safest communication towers. So if the wingsong stream does change permanently, at least there’ll be a roaring trade in bamboo. And how ironic will it be if, after a lifetime of Tyk bearing the mark of a wanderer, the whole hive – every hive in the area, even, perhaps – has to move, and she does no more wandering than anybody else.

No, that’s silly. The hives are far too entrenched, their populations too large, to be moving about like that. All hives have to move eventually, but that’s into freshly revitalised land, with generations of warning, not rushing to new places on near-exhausted land to hurriedly rebuild on short notice. If the wingsong streams have changed permanently, then they’ll… they’ll… Tyk doesn’t know. The chances of every single hive still having another good spot nearby to rebuild their tower is very low.

But the adults will know what to do. If it comes to that. Which it probably won’t. The wingsong stream will settle, and they’ll gather the sly people I one location, and Tyk will take Smon there and help to set their hive up, which isn’t quite as good an argument for “I’ve completed my star-chosen destiny” as escorting a baby star to a legendary mountain would be, but is still workable, especially if it takes a long time.

Yeah. Everything will work out fine.

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