Lovelock by Orson Scott Card

Author:Orson Scott Card
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1994-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

REBELLION

Pink and I might have been the only slaves in our household, since we had been purchased, but that did not mean that everyone else was free. During the weeks that I struggled to break the shackles of my conditioning, others, too, found that our new life on the Ark might provide an opportunity to slip out of bondage. We were no longer in the same society that we had lived in before, and therefore we could no longer fill the same roles. What had been bearable before might be unbearable now.

I had only been at the business of climbing the walls for a few days when I was startled out of my exhausted sleep one morning by Emmy’s shrieking. “Bees!” she cried. “Bees! Bees!”

I had visions of a swarm of Africanized bees stinging her to death, which did not seem an unmitigated tragedy. But the quiet reaction of the adults told me that it was no emergency. I got up and loped into the kitchen, where Emmy was jumping up and down in front of the household computer. Sure enough, there were bees pictured on the screen. It was a little animation program, apparently sent to our house over the network. A sort of message.

And not a very subtle one, either. When I arrived, Red and Pink were already in the kitchen with Emmy and Lydia, and soon Carol Jeanne, Mamie, and Stef emerged from the back of the house to see what was going on. The animation was simple enough. A flower appeared somewhere on the screen. Worker bees discovered it, swarmed over it, and then flew back to the hive. On top of the hive were two sleeping bees. The workers came and deposited their honey inside the hive. As if it were a translucent tank, we could see the hive filling up with honey. Then the worker bees flew off. Immediately the two sleeping bees woke up, flew to the hive entrance, and drank the honey until the hive was empty again. Then the hive sank out of sight and a new flower appeared.

After about three flowers, however, there was a change. When the workers came back to find the hive empty again, they picked up the two sleeping bees, carried them off, and dropped them in front of a giant human shoe, which came down hard and squished them. As the workers flew back to the hive, buzzing happily, a message crawled along the bottom of the screen: “Drones are thieves, but they can’t steal the workers’ honey forever.”

“Where did you get this silly program, Red?” asked Mamie.

“It isn’t a program,” said Red. “It’s a message.”

“You mean somebody sent this to us?” said Mamie. “But they didn’t even sign it. What does it mean?”

Could she really have been so oblivious? I think she expected everyone to protect her from the nastiness of the message, so that she didn’t have to admit that she understood.

Stef answered her, and his voice was not nice. “This message is from one of our neighbors,” he said.

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