By Erin MacNair
In the late afternoon, BeeBee and I dig up the fat gem, yanking it from the caked earth, brushing it off hurriedly with our callused forelegs. BeeBee’s black eyes bulge, and he claps one leg over my mouth before I can chirp and give us away. I turn around and quickly rebury it with my hindlegs, pushing it into the wall of the hole so no other beetleminers can see. BeeBee pokes his tiny head out of our hollow, straining his neck, antennae wavering, smelling for Christiano, hoping not to find him.
Our hole is narrow and deep; barely enough room for two beetlemen. We bend around each other and work as one, scrabbling through the rocks and roots, searching, slipping in the muck, our exo-shells expanding to protect the human parts. These holes are everywhere in our camp, each filled with desperates, searching for tiny fuelgems trapped in the ancient riverbeds, the acrid scent of misery clinging to the scarred dirt. We sell everything we find through Christiano, who is crooked but always gets past the bandits and government roadblocks.
“See, Alima, you just need the right hole,” BeeBee says, making a crude humping gesture. I laugh nervously. Bee Bee is good with humor; it calms my skittish nerves. BeeBee is a good guy and like a brother. I have known him that long. In school, he knew how to navigate trouble, knew how to duck dung if it was flying–the youngest of seventy. He was better at learning the human-speak, better at everything except tests of strength. We fought like family, once rolling around in the dirt and bloodying each other over who the neighborhood females liked best. I resisted the urge to just snap him in two, that would show his bombardier ass who was bossbug. Our parents chastised us later, told us how those many thousands of years ago we did not care about such things: we used to just work and work until we died. My family rolled balls of dung uphill both ways, never tiring. We could fly then if we had to. We ate, we rested, we worked, we died. It’s said those were better times.
It is BeeBee I went to after my midnight birthday on the eve of the new year, not my family. He was silent at first, pulling two forelegs against his long hair, tying it in a knot behind his neck, his habit when he problem solved. He suggested we lose ourselves amongst the thousands of others surging towards the edges of forest zone three on the east coast of Muzba, our maritime island. He didn’t need to remind me I could now be tried as an adult.
“There will be fuelgems, saphspheres even. Maybe we can keep some? Trade our way up in the world?” BeeBee said. He kept going about the kinds of foods he would buy with the riches, homes with actual walls–not piecemeal metal scraps. The real queens that would finally look his way, their feathered antennae wavering at his confident musky scent. But he is really doing this for his family, he will return to them if he makes any money. So far, we have only made enough for food and riverdrink, its silted earth rimming the edges of our morning cups.
“A new life for us, yeah,” I’d said, brushing the yellow road dirt out of my legs, washing and re-washing as best I could to rid myself of it. I will have to keep going or turn myself in. We will just have to see.
Christiano takes too much of our cache. We will starve before we can save enough, though there are plenty of buyers hovering at the outskirts of our illegal mine, mostly Rhino-horned or Scorpion-men, set up in hasty woven huts made of twigs on the edges of this blasted crater we dig in. They move where the action is until we get run off or the holes dry up and offer only dirt clods. Christiano knows which buyers work for the Muzba officials and gets them the best stones. They look away from our trespassing if they get first pick—it’s better to have us busy than begging. But most gems are small, barely enough to fuel the tiniest of craft, just the hover-mats or slip-slides, not the time-benders everyone wants.
We find lots of pink and green fuelgems, like frozen buds of old-world fauna. We often dig up the bones of creatures; many types of animals lived here once. But Christiano isn’t interested in bone-trading; he wants us to find the blues, black hunks until you wash them and hold them to the sun, their color revealed, blue as the deepening dusk and worth lots of money. But ours is not a blue. It’s pinkish, like a tiny, sunbaked grub-baby streaked with dirt, curled in on itself like it’s sleeping. We have heard of this type but have never seen one. Nobody we work with has ever seen one.
“The Baby,” BeeBee calls it, whispering the human-speak. It’s a good name.
If anyone gets a look at what BeeBee and I have found, we are rich or done for and we’d rather be rich. BeeBee has always had a back-up plan in case we get into trouble: a cousin with a ferry-bender. He can meet us on Prune Island, not so far away off the coast. The cousin can sell for us, but we will first have to get past Christiano. And the bandits, of course, who are worse, who circle the traveling camps, swarmfleas with cold, red eyes. They come at night, selecting tents they haven’t terrorized yet, brandishing rusty longblades, overturning everything, and baring their filed mandibles in the moonlight. Many of the females run off with their girlnymphs to hide in the trees. The bandits shout and threaten until the lawmakers arrive to run them off. We can’t give them what we don’t have, so it’s best to get rid of everything during the day. Christiano does this for us, moving amongst the holes in his clomping boots with speed, calling us to look up into his wide, rectangular pupils, his shiny black horn painted with gold stripes. Those who don’t work with Christiano are left to the bandits. Usually, the bandits let you go with just a cracked eye or bruised ribs. Usually. I hate that we need him, he is the lowest and pretends to be more human than he is, with his boots and dirty mirrored eye shields.
“We have to move quickly, the light is with us,” BeeBee says. We pull the baby out and stash it in a piece of cloth, skittering up the rocky embankment toward the edge of the tallwood, away from the mass of bodies and scattered leaf tarp tents, triangle points just high enough to crawl under. We stop to squat, the scorched earth soaking up anything it can take. BeeBee looks around for eyes, as if this is our only business here––a moment of privacy. We walk upright, our backs to each other, to see all the angles, any threat. My stumpy body fits neatly in the elongated grove between his stiff wings, his back elegantly patterned with shiny tan blotches like the faces of our distant ancestors. The splicing was many thousands of years ago; there are no unmerged humans left, but I imagine their faces like this, stretched mouths always open.
A flush of safety in our brotherhood overwhelms me––I unwittingly emit an appreciative hum. But BeeBee turns and pulls me into the talltrees by my front legs, further, further still.
“Don’t be rough, BeeBee,” I say, my human-speak a piercing warble, but I know he is just scared. We drop to the ground and move fast until we come to a natural hollow under a felled giant.
“Wait here, wait until everyone is sleeping and then walk right through. No one will notice you. Anyone who is up will be looking at the red moon.” I suck in my breath. I had forgotten in our haste, this momentous evening. Tonight is the eclipse.
“It could be a bad oma. We should wait.”
“Omen.” BeeBee corrects and continues as if he didn’t hear me.
“Christiano might be looking for you because maybe he saw us? So be careful. And bandits, right? Lie low. Duck behind the tents and try not to fall into any holes. Carry the baby in the cloth, like a sling, like the women do with grub-babies, like you’re helping someone out. Make it look real. Find some grub-hair for it, or earthmud, anything to hide its color. I will be on the other side up the hill, waiting with a slip-slide, by the Scorpion stand with the buyer who likes only the greens.” BeeBee is breathing hard, like he can’t pull enough air into his residual lungsacks.
BeeBee tells me this but doesn’t think about my comfort; he doesn’t leave me anything for a cold night, no dried insects to eat. He only eats vegetation so perhaps in this commotion he has forgotten my flesh-eating ways, abhorrent to his morals but just another thing he ignores for our friendship. He turns away without looking at me, but I know he has to get the message off quick. I watch him scramble down the hill, noting his nubby head, his stuck-out antennae, the left one bent in a long-ago fight. He always said I was the good looking one, but that’s just because my mandibles are straight. We’ve always known who was smarter, who was learning toolcraft and gem-engines and who was the one holding the tools, thinking about laying down with females instead of how to make money, how to provide.
The little stones we find offer a reason to stay, a way to exist beyond the boundaries of lawmakers, but this gem-sphere is another thing. I spit on the baby, wiping the red dirt away, rubbing one spot clean. I hear a scuttling in the brush, most likely one of the last of the animals we push further and further away as we rip up anything we can to find the stones before we, too, must run. I hunker further down into the groove to wait, staring up into towering woodgiants, searching for what BeeBee says is called the blood moon, for its color of unspliced human blood.
I dream of my family, of that night, drifting into an imprint of the same story, a shadowy loop I’m forced to climb into every time I close my eyes.
I am shout-chirping at my sister, yelling at her back as she is bent over, cleaning a smear of grease off the floor, her grub-boy strapped to her front. I tell her how stupid she is.
“You’ll never do anything but farm fungi and make grub-babies,” I say, even though I know I am the one who isn’t doing anything useful. I’m about to be a man, it’s a new year ahead yet I have done nothing to help, I just fritter time buying rotten fruits and daydreaming of driving a time-bender. She is always helping, gathering, and hunting. My father flips off his resting platform, silent, standing to his full height, soft pectorals rippling. He lifts me like a Rhino-beetle might impale an enemy, pinching me behind the head so hard my vision blurs. He takes a few steps from the ramshackle room and throws me outside and onto the ground. I pull my face from the dirt to look at him, his pointed head furred with dense, white hair, the bushy halo a mark of the last stage. I have chipped a maxilla––the tip is split wide and hanging. His voice rumbles from inside his chest, gaining momentum like a boulder-quake.
“Get out. Come back when you are someone of worth, not of insults.”
I spit blood at his feet. I know he is right, that I start and never finish anything I do, that I don’t help much with the harvesting, but I want this to be his fault, for not giving me some other sort of life, an easier one with excess insects to eat and a craft of my own, not some puttering slip-slide, and a hut with sentinels out front. My mother’s eyes watch me from beyond the frame of the crooked window, just a chewed hole in the corrugated metal. Her narrow face pulls into a grimace, mandibles pulled back to reveal a gleaming row of pointed human teeth.
Her face ripples–elongates–taking the shape of the mantis-nymphgirl, chin jutted, eyes widening with fear, orbs reflecting my body hurtling towards her, my egregious speed on the rickety slip-slide, her arms frozen, delicate green fingerlings extended in a half wave.
We see each other. It is only a moment, but I cannot escape it.
Again, I dream-dive into the darkness, those moments just before.
My leg pounds at the controls, useless tears fighting to stay inside. I drive the slip-slide fast, its transparent, curved half-shell keeping the wind off my face and arms, cursing my family, cursing my inability to accept a life of farming like my father and his father before, our inability to escape poverty, our government that does not care. I should surrender to this knowledge and take my place. The slip-slide hovers, gliding into the dark night and throwing back the yellow marks of street-paths.
I take a corner a little too widely, the slide’s frame shuddering with effort.
Then the sudden bolt of light from nowhere: the quick whitegreen wings in the dark.
There are the large eyes, her face, a crumpled body flying. The horrible, wet noise–slap–my swerving and skidding to avoid this thing that has already happened. The slide putters to a stop as I get out to look. What can I do? I cannot help, yellow dust already settling on her round, open eyes, her tiny face. I return to the slip-slide to wipe smears of goo from my shield, every part of me quivering as if to fly away, the blood pooling in her light green hair and I don’t try to do anything or tell anyone, so she haunts me. There is only my life before the mantis-girlnymph and after. Tonight, her eyes are as orange as flame-embers, accusing. A low, throaty noise surges from her crumpled body, so small it could be a pile of battered twigs.
My thorax jerks and I loosen from my dream, mind spitting me back into the nighttime. I spot the girlnymph crouching above me in a tree, the outline of her long mantis face in the shadow of the giant moon. No. Not her—a Fossacat, its large eyes moving closer, goldengreen hip bones swaying in readying dance, a growl pummeling the air. It’s coming at me, so I spring from my hiding spot, yelling in human-speak. The Fossacat jumps away. Its eyes are not as profoundly orange as Christiano’s but filled with just as much dislike. In my haste I’ve dropped the baby; it has rolled nearby under a fallen tallwood. Cursing my stupidity, I bend down and pat the undergrowth with one limb. There. A stinging pain shoots through me as I grasp the sharp edge and almost drop the baby again. This is not good. What if I am poisoned by an arachnidon? Collecting mossy fur off the underside of the tallwood for grub-baby hair, I stuff the cloth, giving the shape curves and soft edges, fashioning a makeshift sling from the threads, not knowing the best way, never having paid any attention to how my sister did it. My leg grows numb with pain, radiating from a tiny dot of blood where I’ve been pierced. The moon has found me, lighting up the trampled pathway.
Choosing my steps carefully, I make my way back to camp. The blood moon is an enormous circle, the color of the orangepink saphsphere, the rarest of all, and the most beautiful. Our grub-baby could be an orangepink.
The moon’s light hums around the edges. I take this as a good omen until I look closely at the ragged outlines of the camp. The hum is the collective murmurs of those evacuating. The bandits have come, or the militia, finally sick of our squatting on their supposed enviro- protected park land. I have dreamt right through it. They have wrecked every standing campsite, shelters ripped, their skeletal frames stomped into the mud. I will have to disappear again––too bad, this throng of bodies made hiding easy, the lawmakers not looking for fugitives amongst those they couldn’t care less about.
It’s not the militia––there’s no pop-hiss of flameweapons, toasting the bodies of my fellow beetlemen––it’s only bandits, lit up in the blood moon eclipse, ragged swarmflea shadows swaggering through the devastation. Some beetlemen stop to raise their forelegs, pretending to grab the moon, begging for its protection.
Silently I slip past the females softly clicking to their terrorized families. Makeshift packs are fashioned from ripped leaftarps; those who can take anything with them are taking things with them. It is a mass of movement, like we are vacating a diseased nest. There is garbage everywhere, in the trees, in the dirt, strips of dried insects rolling across the ground, dirty scraps of washing cloth flung everywhere. There is smoke and shouting: this is not what BeeBee said it would be like; everyone is awake. The giant circle in the sky suddenly seems more like a pulsing, angry eye, focusing on me. I am caught in its bloodied gaze and cannot look away. I think of the nymphgirl again, her mouth forming words in the flash of my sidelights. A slice of the actual moon peels out from behind the darkened orb, breaking the spell. The beetlemen drop their pretense of ritual and get on with the leaving.
BeeBee appears from behind a mound, again grabbing me by the leg. I hiss with irritation, the sting spot raw and weeping.
“Move, move,” he says. “There is a bandit just there.” I see him, eyes narrowed to thin lines, threatening a female, only a few feet from where our hole was, all our goods strewn and stamped into the muck.
I whisper to Bee Bee. “Now, your 57th cousin?”
He nods his head and leads me away. We are careful to avoid the deep holes penetrating the earth in all directions like gaping mouths. I look into one as we pick our way across. Someone has piled all their insect meat into it, a month’s worth at least, the tubular dried packages matted with mud.
“BeeBee…my leg,” I start to tell him, but he slams me with an outstretched wing, and I slide down into a deep shaft, hindleg twisting underneath. Sucking in my maxillae I try not to cry out. There is only one reason BeeBee would do this. BeeBee is arguing with someone.
“I have not seen Alima. I was talking to Tsoiry, Tsoiry, who ran off just now.”
Mother, you were wrong to name me after father. Alima the wise. Today and every day before, not so much. Scrabbling in the hole for the baby, I pull it close. That grating-stones voice is unmistakable. Christiano does not sound happy.
“I have heard a few things… about you and Alima,” Christiano says. “You have secrets.”
I smile in the darkness. Does he think we are sexing? The thought comes, along with stifled giggles because we are going to be killed; the fear a high whine and thrum inside my head I hope isn’t audible. Craning my neck to see out, the lip of the real moon is growing wider, the enormous blood eye rolling back into its head.
“Perhaps you don’t share every find with me?”
Christiano and BeeBee argue in low voices, back and forth. BeeBee is losing, his voice getting higher and louder as he rubs his wings together. Christiano wins.
“Right now, you will say nothing, BeeBee. You will both come.”
My leg throbs with numbness but competes with my hindlimb for worsening pain. BeeBee lowers a rope and bucket, and I half sit in it, rising in jumpy arcs. The makeshift crank groans with my weight as it climbs up, up, and into the flaring gaze of Christiano, his pock-shelled face close enough to smell his last rancid meal.
“Hello Alima,” he says. He is smiling, fangy teeth hanging out in front of mandibles.
“Christiano!” I try an easy voice, like we are best friends, him and I, just a Rhino and a Dungman hanging out. Christiano clips me upside one antenna with a rough slap.
“Keep it at your chest, don’t let anyone see. Move.”
We make good time humping it up the high slope, towards the untouched cooking huts and buyer’s shelters, fear-elation masking my injuries. Christiano is tall and wears the militaristic horn stripes to confuse people––but everyone knows it’s him and moves out of his way before he must ask. We pass a bandit, his crisped torso covered in mud and footprints. His dark blood pools downward towards a hole, staining the edges. Christiano stops, prying a longblade from the dead man’s fingers. After that, I decide not to say anything about my injuries. My whole upper thorax aches with a stinging heat as I hobble quickly up the ridged earth.
We breach the crest and come to BeeBee’s rusty slip-slide, its front shield caked with dirt and cracked on the curved edge. BeeBee piles me into the protective half shell. We are jammed in like two grubs in a sack but I’m relieved to take the pressure off. Christiano wants to see the baby.
“There are eyes around, everywhere?” BeeBee spits out. He pulls his hair back and ties it into two knots. I know what’s coming––we have many unspoken signs between us, years of silent messages honed during our schooling. Christiano smiles. His look says I will kill you for that disrespect.
“Just there, in the alley between the cooking huts,” BeeBee says, pointing.
Cristiano’s eyes become further slits, but he nods once. BeeBee reaches down to lift the kickstand. He grabs something heavy, a rock maybe, and cracks Christiano across the face and once more on the head until he falls to the ground, hand to his bleeding horn. Clever BeeBee, he’d stashed the rock underneath the slip-slide––he must have always had a plan. BeeBee rips the stolen longblade from Christiano’s hand and turns to offer a final insult––the remnants of his unused bombardier sac. BeeBee sprays Christiano in the face and he screams in misery, maybe blinded, for sure scarred by the acid. Christiano roars, clawing at my leg as we speed away. There’s a moment where I can only hear my heart slamming into my chest as a blast of heat passes my head; a tent-pole bursts into flame to the right. BeeBee flies us through the tent alleys, screaming.
“AGHHHhhhhhHHH!” BeeBee yells, like he is getting a beating, but he wants the buyers to stay in their tents so we can escape unseen. The dirt kicks up in clouds behind us; we are a fire devil storm ripping through the night. The baby’s moss-hair is whisked off and joins the garbage tumbling in our wake.
I look up at the moons pulling free of each other, pressing the baby into BeeBee’s back as I hold onto him with my functioning forelimb. There is not one moon but three now, swaying in shifty dance.
“I am poisoned,” I tell BeeBee, forming the words with parched mandibles against his sweat-slick wings. He doesn’t hear me as he swings onto the long road to the coast. He stops once for gem-swapping, the slip-slide recharging with a shudder. He makes me drink water he has stolen; it is clean but tastes like metal shavings. Bee Bee finally notices my sweat, dripping from under my shell. It reeks of a rotting, tangy citrus.
“What is the matter with you, Alima. Have you never been on the run before?”
He is teasing me, trying to lighten the load which will be forever mine to carry. He knows it wasn’t my fault, what happened. Or maybe he thinks it was, but he will never let me know. This joking is inappropriate, but he is smiling with thoughts of homefreeness, antennae wavering in delight. He is too excited to notice I am possibly dying.
“I am. Poisoned,” I push the thick words through in human-speak and this time he hears and looks worried. He turns me over and looks at my chest and sees the raised goose-bump flesh.
“How bad? We can find help.” He says, his eyes scanning a thickwood that offers him nothing but a thread of a yellow dustpath winding off into the darkness.
“You must carry the baby,” I say. It’s real to me now, squirming, needy, my body drooping under the load. He throws the cloth around me and ties me to his back. The baby is pressed to his chest like a goiterlump. We ride off into the void of quiet night, towards the coast, our only giveaway the puffing smoke of the slip-slide, quickly invisible as it rises into the night.
* * *
I awake in a ditch, BeeBee next to me watching a main road.
“We are not far from the boat, it’s just there, around the bend, but Christiano has caught up to us. He has some bandits in the back of his roam-rover.” We should have known he works with the swarmfleas. Someone must have seen us turn off this way to the lesser path.
“How? How?” BeeBee’s face is pulled into a grimace of anger and disgust. He pulls at his long hair, stroking, stroking, trying to calm himself. It doesn’t matter how Christiano found us. He has. BeeBee clenches his mandibles, clacking with irritation. He looks at me with yellowed, blade-throwing eyes.
“We need to swim around the big rock. The ferry-bender will be there.” BeeBee says. I wonder how he knows it will be there? If the cousin is as reliable as BeeBee says or if he has been paid off, too? How will I swim? One leg is dead, a tingly grey feeling spreading across my chest, one hindleg useless. How? Soft, hitching click-blubs spray from my maxillae. BeeBee sees my human-tears coming. He grips my shell, shaking me slightly.
“This one last thing, just this Alima, and then we will have anything we can dream.”
He ties the baby just under his mouthparts.
I try to think of something I even want.
Hidden in the last thicket of tallwood, I assess the pebbled edge of the water. We’re going to have to skitter as fast as we can and dive in. Christiano is in the back of the roam-rover with a stained bandage around his face, one rectangular eye sealed shut with goo, shouting and waving a torcher. We watch him throw his forelegs in the air, directing and pounding his hand on the side of the armoured vehicle, enjoying this hunt. He points half the bandits to our side of the beach; he and the others go the other way. Our chances are bad but not as bad as if we got the Christiano side.
We wait until our bandits jump further away, further past the outrock we will need to swim to. BeeBee says nothing but pulls me up, and we are crouching like hunchbacks as if this will help us in a wide-open place. We slip into the water.
“The rock, it’s just there!” BeeBee swings the baby to his back, nestling it between his long wings; it must be choking him. There’s shouting, running, the sound of revving.
I dive deep underwater, just for a moment, a quick rest. The moon is huge and bright, and I realize it has given us away. BeeBee is kicking away in front of me, and then there are pockets of water ripping open with blasted projectiles. BeeBee’s legs stop kicking. The baby starts to drag him down. Bee Bee’s legs float upwards from his body as if in feverish prayer. I kick towards him and untie the rock, holding the bundle close, letting the cloth drift to the surface. Pockets of quick bubbles open all around me in neat lines. I cradle the baby in two forelegs, beams of light illuminating it underwater. It’s beautiful, a shard of pure magic. The water pulls at my body, the light dancing above, receding further and further. I look again as the grub-baby becomes just another dark rock in the water.
I sink into the shadows to see the girlnymph’s eyes, round as moons.
“Don’t step out of the darkness. Don’t cross into the road,” I say.
She doesn’t hear me. Again, that moment, taking the curve too quickly, and then.
“Don’t,” I say, water rushing over my chipped maxillae. We hold each other’s gaze, drifting into the depths, as I think about what it is that I really want.
* * *
Erin MacNair is a Wisconsinite living in British Columbia, Canada. Her award-winning stories are published in many literary and speculative journals and anthologies. More info at: www.erinmacnair.com.
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