A ripple of dismay ran through the crowd.

“Yes!” Sister Sage said to them all. “Even foragers may be measured, for no sister is exempt from the Holy Law. Eggs blight in the nursery—which means she who curses this hive still runs free, and seeks to pass her evil spawn as the pure issue of Holy Mother.” A frightening tone entered her voice. “What is our highest law?”

“Only the Queen may breed.”

“Again!” Sister Sage’s voice seemed to come from all around the Dance Hall, and the bees repeated the phrase over and over, staring at the humiliation of the famous forager.

Flora stood completely still while two officers ran their calipers over her. They were rough and pried at her intimately, they went over her antennae again and again with their burning scanners until the smell of her heating cuticle rose into the chamber and the bees wept at her pain, but Flora was strong from her forage and withstood it all.

“She smells, Sister,” said one of the police, her great jaws ready to bite.

“And her belly is swollen,” said another, her hooks gleaming.

“That scent is my kin. I am a flora and a forager, and I stretch this belly with nectar from a thousand flowers a day if I can find them, to bring home to our hive. Accept, Obey, and Serve.”

“Accept, Obey, and Serve,” shouted the bees, as if a Sage priestess had said it.

“Silence!” The inspecting officer cuffed Flora’s head. For a moment her anger caused her antennae lock to shift.

“She hides something!” cried the officer. “She locks her antennae from us!”

“Open them.” Sister Sage walked close to Flora. “Open them.”

Flora resisted until Sister Sage was using all her psychic force to break her mind apart—and then she released her seals.

High, roaring air currents—the murmuring tree—the wasps in the warehouse, gathering for attack—

“How dare you.” Sister Sage stepped back and Flora resealed her antennae and stood quietly. For the first time in many days, she became aware of the weak and distant pulse of Devotion in the comb. Then she saw the great numbers of sanitation workers clustered around the edge of the room. Some of them twisted their faces in grimacing smiles at her and she knew that despite the unspoken rule against their presence here, they had all come to watch her dance.

Sister Sage turned to the foragers.

“Ego is the great peril of your occupation. You begin to believe what the flowers tell you, instead of the Holy Law. Only Queen and Colony matter.” She turned back to Flora. “For the rest of the day you will return to Sanitation and all will command your labor. Tomorrow you will go out at dawn, and if by the noon azimuth you have not returned with a whole cropful of nectar, you are exiled.”

The foragers crowded forward, not waiting for permission to speak.

“None of us could do that— It is not to be found— The flowers come to their end— Any of us would die trying!”

Sister Sage stared at them, her antennae crackling. “In the air, you may think for yourselves. Here, the Hive Mind takes that care from you. Do not reject it.”

Flora stepped forward.

“I accept the task.” She looked across at the sanitation workers. “I will try my best, for the honor of my kin.”

“Then you will fail. The honor of your kin is found in dirt and service. To teach otherwise is to wound them with confusion.” The scent of Devotion rose stronger through the comb, and the priestess raised her antennae.

“Our Mother, who art in labor, Hallowed be Thy womb.”

All the bees took it up, releasing their tension into the formal beauty of the Queen’s Prayer until the Dance Hall echoed with their voices. Flora spoke it too, her heart stirred back to life by the confrontation. The air grew warm and soft around her as many sister bees came to stand wing to wing with her, protecting her and sharing their strength. They hummed the words of the Queen’s Prayer but they did not speak, for they were floras.

Twenty-Six

THE NEXT DAWN WAS COLD AND BRIGHT. HIGH AND sweet the birds sang their territories in the soft green light of the orchard—but standing on the board Flora felt a change. She unlatched her wings but did not start her engine. All was calm and still, except for the dazzling skein of light floating between the trees. It drifted until it caught on a twig. The next moment it shuddered taut as a spider sailed down it, another line unspooling behind her. Deftly she fastened it to the same twig, then ran back up the double line on her eight scrambling legs.

“I heard the Sage speaking of it yesterday.” It was another forager, Madam Dogwood. “When the spiders come, winter soon follows.”

Flora looked out at the gossamer webs shining in the trees, exquisite traps set across the flight corridor.

“So they knew.”

More foragers emerged onto the landing board, but when they saw Flora, they stopped. Knowing her impossible task, they made room to give her first departure. The Thistle guards saluted her.

“Queenspeed, Sister,” some said.

“Mother be with you,” said others.

The sun was shifting. Flora bowed to her hive, set her engine to hard ascent, and leaped from the board.

AFTER THE HARVESTS the fields were brown deserts menaced with birds, and the narrow green sanctuaries at their edges all gone, now piled with broken stalks and clods of earth. The roadside flowers hung their dusty heads, empty and exhausted of anything a bee might want. Flora went to check the dog roses she had danced, but found their scent faded and their simple beauty wrinkled and spent. When she did not alight, their petals fell in sorrow.

In the town there was very little to be had; the gardens were nearly empty of friendly flowers, though many provocatively dressed foreign ones stood bold and bright, flaunting their sterile sexes. The foxgloves and the snapdragons, whose particular tricks of access Flora had delighted in perfecting, were long gone, the echium had fallen, but there were still some fuchsia, whose hanging bells required skill to plunder. Flora took all she could find, but it was paltry. She was about to leave the gardens and their reeking black waste bins buzzing with flies when she smelled a thistle in bloom.

Even for the most orthodox bees of Flora’s hive, this plant transcended its weed status by the strength of its nectar and the skill of the forage. She located it behind the stench of the bins and went closer. The thistle was so strong it had forced its way through the asphalt, then the dark space between the bins, straining its sharp purple crown up to the light. At Flora’s approach it pushed its scent harder, and the touch of her feet made its prickly petals shiver in gratitude.

She drank it dry, then searched the town for more of its kind, or dandelions, scrubby red dock bloom, or anything at all that might give nectar, for her crop was not even half full. The smell of sugar rose from litter blowing on the ground, but it reminded Flora of the wasps, and she went on. The azimuth of the sun shifted closer to noon. Her crop was only half full, but to keep searching would be to use what she had gathered as fuel. There was nothing more to find, and nowhere to go but home.

IN THE MIDDAY LIGHT the webs became invisible, and Flora almost forgot them until she heard the warning yells of the foragers on the board. She veered steeply up above the apple trees and made a vertical descent to the landing board, feeling her fuel level drop at the expensive maneuver. By the tense faces of the other foragers, they had been forced to do the same. Guards approached Flora.

“My sisters Thistle. I have only a half crop of nectar, but call a receiver and I will go out again and keep searching—”