When the Bees Fell Quiet

By R. F. Daniels

Illustrated by Sue Matthews

The first thing I noticed wasn’t the darkness, but the quiet.

I don’t know what possessed me to even go outside during the sundark that first time; everyone knows it’s dangerous to go outdoors in general, and the wallscreens had been fearsomely red the days leading up to it with warnings to stay inside. None of my roommates had wanted to go with me. Arlie told me I was going to bring bad luck down on our creche, that it was problemsome to ignore the wallscreens especially when Venus was in the second house. Then Mieke told her that she didn’t even know where Venus was since nobody could see beyond the cloud belt anymore, Arlie started crying, and when everyone was trying to comfort her, I just grabbed my badge and slipped out the door.

It wasn’t any darker than a bad storm day at first, though the cloud belt was more deep orange than green. But it was quiet. And not just because everyone else was following orders and staying inside, although they were. There was something else. It took me until the end of the sundark, when I saw the stirrings out of the corners of my eyes and heard the familiar buzz and thrum settle back into its usual backdrop, to realize what had happened. Watching a bee wake up from a nap wasn’t something I’d ever even imagined I would see in my life, all clumsy and jerky as if it was drunk on ash-dark pollen. I hadn’t known bees could sleep until that day.

Who would have thought that a sundark could teach me something?

The second thing I noticed wasn’t the darkness either, but her.

After my discovery at the end of that first sundark I was curious. Well, not the first ever by any means—the priests told us that such events were much more frequent now than they used to be as punishment for what Ondatra had done to the moon—but the first I saw with my own eyes. I wanted to see if it would happen again, that unnatural quiet. And when my going out the last time hadn’t met with any consequence besides Arlie trying to give me extra tarot readings for a week, I set an alert on my tab to tell me about the next occurrence.

A couple months later, when I slipped out onto the silent street and darted between the rusted car frames out to the median, she was there too. Almost as if she was waiting for me. We spoke in whispers and fragments; neither of us could believe at first that the other wouldn’t turn them in to the priests for problemsome behavior, but our eyes kept meeting over the dented barrels full of wilted purple flowerblooms, and something told me that she was safe.

At first glance, I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a crowd: she wore the month’s correct clothes, the third-most on-trend makeup look. But the more I watched her, the more I saw the little differences, the faded streaks in her hair too vibrant to be natural, the odd pattern to the scarf she wore that almost looked like it was watching me, the knowing glint in her eyes when she smiled at me.

I almost spent more time watching her than I did the bees.

The third sundark she told me her name.

I won’t repeat it here; some selfish part of me wants to keep her all to myself, our familiarity a secret for just the two of us, one little place where our story can remain ours instead of being disseminated for the whole world to consume. We deserve that, I think, after what happened to us in the end.

But she told me her name and I told her mine and we tried them out, tasted them on our lips in whispered voices; speaking them aloud felt like too much against the backdrop of silent bees. She told me she lived just across the street, that she had seen me from her window when I had come outside the first time, that she had watched me instead of the wallscreens like the rest of her creche. I knew even then that I wanted to kiss her, to taste her mouth the way I had tasted her name, but the priests forbade people from choosing their own partners; we both knew it would never be allowed.

When the bees started to stir, she linked her pinky finger around mine, just for a second, before she slipped away back to the safety of the indoors. My whole hand felt like it was buzzing the rest of the day, and I never wanted it to stop.

I was so certain, that day and the next and the next and so many days after, that they knew what I—what we—had done. Mieke got taken away that afternoon, not three hours after the sundark had passed. The walls had heard him talking about another man, using problemsome words that hadn’t been allowed for decades, and while I wasn’t surprised to get confirmation of his proclivities, I was surprised he had gotten caught. Those of us who liked differently had long since found ways to weave our words into secrets, to avoid triggering the listeners that would flag our creche for special attention from the priests.

We were all in the kitchen when they came to take him. Arlie refused to meet his eyes as the silencing cuffs locked around his wrists; later she told everyone who would listen that it served him right for talking about someone whose moon sign was so incompatible with his own. If I had been braver, I would have told her that moon signs stopped mattering when the moon’s orbit had been shifted, that none of her charts meant anything anymore, but I wasn’t brave like Mieke had been.

I spent the next several days almost catatonic with anxiety, to the point that my doser couldn’t keep up and scheduled me an appointment at the med center, where I had to make up some pretty lie about how I was nervous about my upcoming week in the booths. The nurse with the tired eyes gave me a referral to a nearby makeup artist and tweaked the parameters of my doser before sending me away, heart hammering almost more than it had been before.

I had never been brave like Mieke had been.

And so, when the next sundark happened I stayed in my room with the blinds safely shut, so I wouldn’t be tempted to even look outside and see if she was there. I hated myself for it afterwards, but what else could I have done? I didn’t want to end up like Mieke.

The fifth sundark I dared to touch a bee.

It wasn’t much of an act of bravery compared to other things I might have done, but it felt monumental somehow. I never could have done it if she hadn’t been there next to me, standing on that dark quiet street with her arm brushing against mine.

The insect didn’t stir as I carefully picked it up from its flowerbloom bed and set it on her waiting palm. We leaned in close, so close I could almost feel her breath on my cheek, examining the tiny creature. Its body looked less fuzzy than the few sci classes I could remember had led me to believe, but I found myself in awe of the intricacies of its wings. They looked like stained glass in miniature, the edges appearing almost filigreed, and I wondered if, when the sundark was over, they would gleam and glitter in the light.

Maybe they always had and I’d just never bothered to look closely enough.

“It’s not real,” she whispered next to me.

“What?”

“Feel it.”

I ran a finger along the delicate edge of a wing, expecting to accidentally crush it despite the care I was taking, but it felt sturdy under my fingertip. Almost like it was—

“Plastic?”

“Something manufactured,” she said. “I think that’s how they watch us.”

“That’s—” I wanted to say it was absurd, preposterous, that the gods didn’t need artificial bees to see what went on in their domain, but something kept my tongue still. Maybe it was just that I wanted her to like me and didn’t think contradicting her would help; maybe it was a doubt that I’d never even dared to let myself think.

“I want to take it apart,” she said, and her eyes gleamed with an intensity that made me want to do anything she said, just so long as she would keep looking at me like that.

“Won’t they know?” I asked, hand starting to tremble as I touched the bee’s striped body, felt a rough edge catch against a callous. “If they do watch us with the bees, won’t they see us take it apart?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think they’re all offline right now.”

We looked at each other; I didn’t know which I wanted to look at more, the deep brown of her eyes or the plum of her lips.

“If we’re wrong…” I began. I liked the way it sounded, we.

“They would have seen us the other times. They would have taken us by now. I think—”

But we didn’t have time for her to tell me what she thought, because the sundark had not stopped for us and the bee began to stir atop her palm. One tiny twitch of one tiny leg and we dropped it back into the barrel and fled back to our respective homes.

I had never wished before for the sundarks to come more often.

The sixth sundark I kissed her.

Or she kissed me. It happened so fast I could hardly keep track, and because I erased the view from my ocular ‘plants before I even got back inside, all I have is my own fallible memory to go by.

I remember we met at the flower barrel again. I remember the way her hand felt in mine, brown skin warm and oh so soft against my own, how our fingers wove so easily together as if we’d done this thousands of times. I remember that once her lips met mine, I never wanted the moment to end.

“What if we get rid of the bees?” I asked, mumbling the question into her mouth. “I’ve heard rumors of hackers on the darkweb that can take down networks”—I had no idea what any of those words meant—“maybe they could take out the bees as well, so they can’t watch us anymore.”

She kissed me again, and the kiss made me want to be brave.

“We can’t,” she told me. “The bees aren’t real, but what they do is.”

“Watching us?”

“Pollinating.”

I listened to her as she explained, in between kisses, what bees had originally done, back when they were living creatures instead of little machines, how their tiny bodies had collected pollen particles as they bumbled from flower to flower, plant to plant, unknowing helpers of so much that blossomed and grew in the world. Her voice was low, raspy, nothing like the perky women who spouted their infoblurbs from the wallscreens but I could have listened to her for hours.

We didn’t have hours.

No sundark had ever lasted longer than ten minutes, and we had spent nearly all of them talking about bees. It wasn’t enough, I thought, and I told her so. She smiled at me, toothy and lopsided and perfect, and kissed me one more time.

“If we had all the time in the world, I’d spend it all with you,” I said. “I hate that we don’t.”

“We don’t,” she agreed, “but we have this. We can have each other whenever the bees are quiet, and the sun is dark.”

We didn’t have time for another kiss before the bees started up with their familiar now-dreaded hum.

In retrospect, I should have known that something would go wrong on the seventh sundark.

Arlie had always said that seven was an unlucky number.

Maybe I should have listened to her after all.

The day had started out like every other sundark day, with extra ablutions in the morning and a visit from the neighborhood priest scheduled for after breakfast. I said the early prayers the same way I always did, the words to summon the listening gods, ask their attention to our troubles and their forgiveness for our sins. I put on my best version of an attentive face when Maridol told us over smoothies and bowls about her dreams and asked what did we all think they meant.

I couldn’t have cared less about those dreams at that point. All I could think about was her.

Forcing myself to wait until it was fully dark was one of the hardest things I had ever done, but I managed. Then it was my hand on the doorknob and the soft thud of my boots on the pavement and my hands tangled in her hair as the sweet smell of flowers I couldn’t name danced around us on the breeze. I kissed her and she kissed me and together we tasted like hope.

Some part of me knew that we would never be able to have more than that. Even if the sundarks had lasted longer—which the wallscreens said was happening slowly, though nobody seemed quite sure why—it wasn’t as if we could have a relationship that only existed in these stolen moments. No matter how brave I got, it wasn’t as if I was going to fuck her right there on the street, even if the bees weren’t watching us.

I should have been happy with what little time we did have together, in those few minutes when the bees fell quiet. But I got greedy, and there’s nothing the gods love more than to punish greediness. To be fair, we both wanted to stay, both wanted as many seconds as possible with each other before the wheeling of the heavens tore us apart again. I could have kissed her forever, one hand in her hair and the other around her waist and her hands in my back pockets and my heart hammering so hard I could hardly think, could hardly hear anything else until I noticed far too late that I could hear something else and that something else was buzzing all around us.

The last thing I noticed as they took us away was that noise, that harsh drone of judgement so loud I don’t know I ever heard anything else.