Christine Tyler - [BCS298 S03] Read online

  “Say hello to Alexandra for me,” Priscilla said. “She was always sneaking sips of the cherry sencha. Tell me how she likes it.” Alexandra had been 3001, one of my sisters, before she grew blue wings and became an attendant.

  A pair of yellow guards came and led the other kitchen maids and I through the passages of the palace. The Imago had been loath to waste resources when they’d arrived here, so Her Majesty’s pavilion was built atop another structure, and it shared many of the original hallways and all seven hundred and seventy-five rooms and chambers. Of course the aesthetics had to be improved, so the cold limestone and bathstone of old was reinforced and updated with golden resin that glowed with bioluminescence, with life.

  The dining hall was right outside Queen Charlotte’s bedchambers. I kept stealing glances of the ornate double doors, the only thing standing between us and our monarch, as the larvae and I arranged a banquet of sandwiches: ham on brioche, cheddar cheese and chutney on tomato bread, breast of chicken with terragon creamed mayonnaise. There were also salads, fruit salads, crisps, and croissants, all of it accompanied by a cherry sencha with rose petals. We couldn’t actually watch the queen eat, of course, so once the table was spread we waited in an adjacent drawing room and tried to keep our stomachs from rumbling.

  Priscilla had told me that before the Imago came, everyone ate food all the time. She used to cook for hundreds of people every day, and they traveled from all over the world to taste her cooking. Important people gave her stars it was so good. She had three stars, she said, as many as anyone was allowed to have. I never asked which three were hers.

  An hour later, the guards led us back to the dining hall. Queen Charlotte was gone, but her scent lingered like a daydream. It was her attendants’ turn to eat now, and they situated themselves around the massive table. My old sister Alexandra was among them, and I tried to catch her eye. Maybe she hadn’t seen me.

  But then the attendants started eating—eating-eating—and my jaw dropped. Like most Imago, I’d used my proboscis to suck up nectar since the day I metamorphosed. But the attendants had learned how to consume food with their proboscises retracted like a larva’s stump-tongue. I could almost imagine the sensation of the food in my mouth. Biting into a strawberry. Mashing a hundred layers of a croissant. Crunching fried potatoes. Licking the salt from my lips. But when I swallowed, it was only saliva.

  The entourage took this whole process for granted. They gave no comment, uttered not a word of gratitude. Alexandra, meanwhile, was avoiding my gaze. It figured. She drank two cups of the sencha, though. I’d be sure to tell Priscilla.

  Suddenly, the doors to the queen’s chamber flew open, and the entourage gaped with sarnies and teacups halfway to their mouths.

  Queen Charlotte stood in the doorway. Her ancient face was ashen and etched with lines, but a massive, bulbous abdomen stretched taut beneath yards of silk robes. Her legs shook, and she had one arm looped beneath her enormous belly while the other clutched the doorframe in a death grip.

  “I’m... going... for a walk,” she announced, panting.

  “A walk?” echoed the attendants. “Where?”

  “Nowhere. Nowhere in particular.”

  “Not again,” breathed Alexandra as she and the other attendants dashed up and took Queen Charlotte by the arms. “Your Majesty, I think you need to lie down.”

  “No, I mean it this time.” Queen Charlotte tried to shrug them off. “I want to take a walk!”

  The attendants turned to the guards. “Are you daft? Help us!”

  Two guards joined the attendants, pulling at the queen, prying her white fingers from the doorjamb, but Queen Charlotte wasn’t going without a fight. “Let me go! I’m the queen! I will take a walk!”

  “She’s mad!” wailed a nursemaid.

  “But in your condition, Your Majesty,” cajoled a guard.

  “I swear, if we have to do this one more time...” Alexandra muttered.

  Until finally Queen Charlotte was outmanned, dragged back into her bedchamber, and the doors slammed shut.

  The remaining guards rounded on us. “None of you saw this,” they said, and we scurried back to the kitchens without even remembering to take the plates.

  Afternoon Tea—3:00 p.m.

  I had to serve the attendants again, this time in the gardens. They splayed their wings, basking in the sunshine, flaunting blues deep as midnight. And I, feet aching, head aching, back aching, poured them orange pekoe. All the while, the episode in Queen Charlotte’s dining hall reeled in my mind. Was it just because she was dying, or had she always been mad?

  Even more drones had arrived, and Priscilla had the staff move all the parlor chairs onto the lawn to dissuade the army of fops from sitting on the old stone walls while they ate. But if the attendants’ methods of consumption were like an elegant dream, the drones’ were an epic-scale catastrophe. I couldn’t look away from it.

  The drones had never gained the skill of masticating solids like the attendants had. They managed to get Priscilla’s food into their mouths, but they had no idea what do with it once it was in there. Their mandibles worked the empty air as they tried to force their uncoordinated jaws to chew. Some of them resorted to manually holding their mouths shut to keep their proboscises from involuntarily slipping out—the sweeter the food, the greater the instinct to extend it, so watching them struggle with trifle was a riot. Even when they managed to keep everything in and get it all squishy enough, the biggest problem seemed to be getting it down past their gag reflex. Satisfying though, to watch them try.

  Most of them resorted to regurgitating the mess into their pekoe and using their proboscis to suck up the mash. The impeccable balance of Priscilla’s finger sandwiches—cucumber and cream cheese on white bread, watercress and salted butter on wheat, smoked salmon on rye—was annihilated as the drones pulverized them into their own heretical version of nectar. Of course they tried to look distinguished as they did all of this, with their pinkies stuck out from their teacups like bloody yokels.

  Ugh. Drones.

  Alexandra sat at a table with a few nursemaids and a couple of drones. One leaned back on two chair legs like a complete degenerate, sporting a green flat cap and matching vest. The other would have been handsome had his face not been so dour. He wore the ubiquitous blue suit and brown leather brogues, and he sat rigid, one hand stuck to his tea plate, the other on his cup—pinky up, of course.

  The nursemaids and drones listened, rapt, as Alexandra recounted what seemed to be a hilarious story. “Wait, wait, it gets better!” Her voice rose and she slapped the table. “‘Where do you want to walk?’ we ask her, and she says, ‘Oh I don’t want to go anywhere, I want to walk and walk and go nowhere. Maybe in circles!’ and we’re breaking our backs trying to hold her, and I have half a mind to let her go, just to see her try to get that honking great belly out the door!”

  The drone in the flat cap guffawed, while the rest of the table tittered.

  “But she’s gone absolutely balmy again,” Alexandra continued, “She starts asking to read one of those books full of lies—‘just for fun!’—and yammering about those magical pieces of paper you could trade for ‘anything in the world! A pair of shoes! A kingdom! A cow!”

  Alexandra’s audience leaned forward as if this were all too entertaining to be true.

  “And then she looks at me,” said Alexandra. “And I swear she doesn’t even know who I am, and she says, ‘Oh if only you’d seen it. You would have loved this place before the Imago.”

  “And I almost said, ‘If I paint your picture on a million little pieces of paper, then hand them out to all the kitchen maids, will it remind you?”

  Everyone at the table broke into peals of laughter. Alexandra shook her head. Then she saw me, and her antennae perked. She flexed her mandibles as if daring me to comment.

  “I—I think she was just distressed.” I regretted opening my mouth the moment they all looked at me.

  “You eavesdropping, Moth Girl?”
called Flat Cap. “Well, don’t be shy. Come over here and give us your side of the story.” He turned to the others. “Pretty sure Alexandra will make up anything for a bit of attention.”

  Alexandra bopped him on the arm. “This is Olive. We had the same mentor. She was in the kitchens with 4408.”

  “Ah, so you know our queen-to-be.” Flat Cap grinned rakishly.

  I clutched my serving tray. “Why are you talking about Her Majesty like that?”

  “I’m only telling the truth.” Alexandra picked up her cup and saucer. “Queen Charlotte’s lost the plot.”

  “Maybe it’s because she’s spent the last hundred years around people like you.”

  Alexandra’s antennae twitched. “Maybe its because her kind spent hundreds of thousands of years without a proper colony, each trapped in their own pathetic, purposeless existence. When she goes into a spell she thinks she’s back there. She’s that old.”

  “Mother of Perga, I’m glad we’re getting a fresh one,” said Flat Cap. The nursemaids shot him a look. “Long live the queen,” he quipped and ducked his head. It was one thing for a worker to speak disparagingly of her majesty. It was another thing entirely to hear it from a drone. I dearly hoped his chair would tip over.

  “It does seem senseless,” I admitted. “But if the queen wants to walk around in circles, why not let her?”

  “Because,” said Alexandra, “we don’t want her to make a fool of herself.”

  “No, you’ll just make a fool of her behind her back.”

  The nursemaids’ mandibles ticked, but Alexandra laughed as if I’d made the cleverest joke. “Olive here has always been a bit of a dung-roller. Never saw her crack a smile the whole time I knew her. Of course, I was only in the kitchens for five years. Olive’s been there for... how long has it been now?”

  I glowered.

  “Oh yes. Thirty years.” Alexandra extended a dainty proboscis and sipped her tea. “Olive, these good fellows want to know a bit about 4408. She was after my time, of course, but you might know something.”

  “Let’s hear it, Olive,” said Flat Cap, and him using my name was worse than him calling me Moth Girl. “You can take a seat next to me, I don’t bite.”

  “Not anyone but the queen,” said one of the nursemaids, and they all fell into giggles.

  Flat Cap patted the chair next to him. I didn’t budge. “So?” He shrugged.

  “Well,” I said, “she was really bad at killing chickens.”

  “What?” Flat cap squinted.

  “I mean, catching them was one thing, she was pretty good at that, but when it came to killing them she was a right wimp. We stood in the garden for two hours one morning with her barely holding on to one panic-stricken chicken—it’s flapping like crazy and she’s crying like an idiot and I’m trying to show her how to “twist and pull!” on at least a dozen hens. I could barely hear my own voice over her wailing, and she still couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t figure out who was more het up, her or that damned bird.”

  The company stared.

  “That’s... not... exactly what we’re looking for,” said Flat Cap.

  Of course it wasn’t. That was the point. But I could do better than that. “Her five molts were the nastiest I’ve ever seen,” I began again. “She’d howl all night, tossing and turning, and when she woke in the morning she’d be swamped in sheaves of skin. We told her not to, but she tried to calm the itch with ointments and lotions. It only made it grosser, because then everything was soggy when it came off. And it stank like wet dog.”

  Alexandra wasn’t amused, and neither were the drones.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t know what you want to hear. 4408 was a pest. We didn’t really get along.”

  “Well that was a given.” Alexandra sighed. “You don’t get along with anyone.”

  My face heated. Flat Cap chuckled.

  “She’ll never choose you, you know,” I said to the drones. “She’ll pick someone handsome and kind.”

  Blue Suit squinted at me. “What?”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Alexandra.

  “The nuptial flight. When the queen and her mate go off to...” I floundered. I’d never spoken about that in front of a drone in my entire life. Or anyone, really. “You know. Just the two of them. She’d never pick either of you.”

  The drones shifted in their seats. Alexandra gave a little huff of incredulity. “The two of them? Tell me you’re joking.”

  Blue Suit looked like he was going to be sick. The nursemaids covered their mandibles and exchanged glances across the table.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Oh, honey.” Alexandra oozed condescension. “Have you even looked around? There are more than a thousand suitors here. She can’t pick.”

  “But she outflies them... and then... when only the fastest and handsomest is left—”

  I couldn’t hear my own voice over their laughter. Flat Cap hee-hawed so hard his chair finally did tip backwards, which sent the nursemaids shrieking into a fit.

  Alexandra took a deep breath and leaned forward in her seat. “On the day of the nuptial flight, the queen flies out, and the drones follow her. All of them. They’re kicking and biting, trying to get ahead, until a few of them catch up to our dear queen and manage to get a hold.”

  “Get a hold?” I stammered. “You mean she hasn’t got a choice?

  “A choice?” Alexandra peered at me. “Why do you think she tries to fly away from them?”

  For some reason there were still words coming out of my mouth. “You mean one of them just...”

  “I didn’t say one.” Alexandra drummed her fingers on the table. “Ten or twenty usually hit their mark before her majesty manages to escape. Their genitals tear off afterward though, rip right out of their abdomen. So there’s that.”

  “There is that,” Blue Suit repeated dully.

  Alexandra canted her head, as if contemplating exactly how much horror to bestow upon me. “Then the drones go spiraling down to the ground. The impact usually puts them out of their misery. Usually.”

  “But then... why do it?” I asked the drones, but Alexandra answered.

  “Because every drone that fails to mate gets banished to the toxic flats, where they’ll either starve or live to experience getting turned inside-out by the poisonous vapors. Wouldn’t you rather have something quick?”

  I looked from one grim-faced drone to another. “I mean... I...”

  “That was rhetorical, honey bee.” Alexandra tapped her fingers on the table. “The fact is, the drones don’t need a penalty. In the end, stubborn or not, they all surrender to instinct. At its full strength, the sexual hormone is as powerful as those that trigger the five molts. Come nuptial day, this brooding fellow won’t remember his own name, let alone any qualms he may have.”

  Blue Suit glared. “I might.”

  “You won’t,” said Alexandra.

  “But why?” I asked. “Why kill all the drones?”

  “Because the only thing they do other than mate is eat. We don’t have the resources for that, and we’ll have a fresh batch of mature drones to replace them next year.”

  Flat Cap smirked.

  “What are you so smug about?” I asked. “You’ll be dead in two weeks.”

  “Eat, drink, and be merry,” said Flat Cap.

  “For tomorrow we die,” said Blue Suit.

  “And you better believe that I’m going to get a piece of that virgin queen before I go.” Flat Cap tipped his cup to me.

  “Purpose is nectar,” said Alexandra.

  “Purpose is nectar,” they all repeated and held their teacups high. Except for Blue Suit, whose cup was still full.

  “But the rest of the year the queen lives in luxury!” I cringed at my own childishness. “She lounges on silk cushions and gets to eat meat and cake and sandwiches.” Is that what I’d really said that morning? It sounded so stupid now—a desperate reach to make sense of things, to make it better
. But nothing could make it better. Nothing could make the queen’s annual rape anything but what it was, and nothing could erase it from my mind.

  Alexandra maintained her pained civility. “She gets to eat so much because she has to eat so much. It’s her sole responsibility to sustain the population, and with her only popping out a baby every day or so she can barely support a town, let alone a whole city. Nectar would support a higher birth rate, but Charlotte insists she can meet her caloric quota with her absurd human food. But if Her Majesty doesn’t meet her daily quota—which she rarely does—we bring out the tubes, feed her like one of Priscilla’s foie gras geese.”

  I staggered. Priscilla. Did Priscilla know about all this? Of course she did. She had to know, in order to do everything she did. This was why she did it. The time she put into each meal, the perfection. It was an act of love, to help the queen eat. “Does everyone know?”

  “Most,” said Alexandra. “It’s the kitchen maids Priscilla keeps in the dark.”

  “Why?”

  “So they don’t realize how pointless their work is.”

  “I thought making larvae work at all was pointless,” said one of the nursemaids.

  “But it’s not,” I said, “If it helps.”

  “All that work?” asked Alexandra. “All those resources? For one person? With logic like that, Priscilla can barely call herself an Imago. But I’m not the one who gets a say in all of that.” The hypocrisy of Alexandra sipping her pekoe while defaming Priscilla’s name sent my glands into high production. “Maybe you should scamper back to Mummy,” she added. “Spare us your distress cloud.”

  “You think you worked your way out? You think you earned your station?” I gripped my serving tray tighter to keep it from shaking. “You didn’t. You got lucky. One good rip in your wings and you’d be back in the kitchens.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” Alexandra said. “Priscilla would finally have a daughter to stay with her that she actually liked!”

  My serving tray went flying and I was halfway across the table before I knew it. Alexandra’s wings shot out instinctively, her powder-blue eyespots both fearsome and fearful. I could do it. I could make her no one. Just one good rip.