Hornets and Others

'I don't believe you.'

He turned those eyes that weren't eyes on her. She was both attracted and repulsed by him at the same time.

'I don't blame you for not believing me,' he said. 'But I didn't lie to you yesterday. I said there was only one day, maybe two, before things went to pieces. I knew we couldn't make it in one day, but if I had said that, none of you would have come. What I didn't know,' and here he paused looking around him; Minnow thought she felt him tremble, 'is that this would happen. But if you and I don't go on, that's the end of it.' His voice became as soft and careful as when he had first spoken out of the shadows, up above.

They locked eyes to eyeholes for a moment, and then Skull nodded sharply.

'We have exactly six hours.'

They went through two more long pulls of tunnel and two more empty storage areas before Minnow felt a sudden change in the atmosphere. It wasn't anything she could put a finger on—something in the floor or walls perhaps, a vibration, something in the air around them. But she knew they were nearing their destination. Despite her best efforts, a small clench of apprehension formed in her stomach, and her steps became more consciously careful. Glancing sideways at Skull, who had been moving along easily beside her, she saw that he too had tensed, and now had his head cocked, as if listening for something.

'Hold it,' he hissed.

They stood, silent as statues.

'There,' Skull said; 'hear that?'

Minnow held her breath, and now she did hear something; low, regular; a barely audible thump-thump of a faraway heartbeat.

'What is it?' she whispered.

He motioned her to be quiet.

It was louder now, getting louder by the minute—the heartbeat of a cat modulating into the heartbeat of an elephant.

Thump-thump, thump-thump—and getting louder still.

Skull yanked on her arm. She pulled back a moment and then saw what he was doing: there was a shadowy cutout in the wall which he pressed them both into.

'Quiet,' he said.

The thumping had turned into something more now, and it was moving quickly toward them. It had the regular, percussive beat of something artificial; it sounded, in fact, like a column of booming bass drums.

And there now, under the thundering, Minnow heard the rattle of snare drums and cymbals.

Without warning, the source of the sounds pulled into view. Skull had an arm across Minnow's chest, holding her tightly back against the wall; he was cutting off her breath but she dared not breathe anyway. What passed before them was a huge, ghoulish marching band—fishpale humans of all sizes, beanpoles and squatty beach balls, all marching and dancing with a manic precision that thoroughly frightened Minnow. They were possessed. Their eyes were vacant with rapture; and the pure look of single-mindedness on their faces was unmistakable. They would die, or burn themselves alive, or do whatever was required of them. The walls rocked with the sound of their instruments and marching feet. They didn't miss a note, and those that played their huge oil drum basses or rattling snares moved with a cog-like precision.

'The beat is their god,' said Minnow with complete, awed certainty after they had gone, leaving only echoed silence.

Skull nodded. 'They want nothing else. They wandered down here, or were caught down here, years ago when the beat started, and now they live for it. During the day their god takes care of them, and at night they service themselves.'

'How do you know that?' Minnow asked. She reached to touch his arm but pulled back.

'Come on,' he said quietly, 'we're almost there.'

'Are you one of them?'

Something in his voice, the inflection, or the quietness, had unlocked a corner of her mind and she had a sudden vision of him dancing. For a split second she knew who he was. But the fraction of a moment passed, and she could not hold on to it. Once more she knew nothing about him.

'Come on,' he repeated in a gentle voice.

Another hundred feet down the corridor and they reached their destination.

'This is it,' said Skull. Through a high vaulted door they entered a massive underground arena. It was in the shape of a dome so huge, and colored such a deep black, that if stars had been painted on it Minnow would have believed they were outside and that this was their flat Earth. The floor was one vast tarpaulin, pulled taut as a drumhead. They advanced slowly to the center of it, and Skull turned to Minnow.

'Take off my mask,' he said quietly, taking her hands in his and moving them up to his face.

Trembling, she did so, and when she pulled the sheath of rubber up over his head she found herself faced with an identical skull, this one of bone. The red candles behind his eyes flared into life.

'You're it,' she breathed.

Skull nodded slowly.

'You're the beat.'

Around them, it became even blacker.

'I think you knew it all along,' he said softly. He made a leisurely, graceful turn around the arena. 'Someone wrote, a long time ago,' he said, 'that the dance is the most perfect form of human expression—that it is the essence of humanity itself. It's been called poetry embodied, beauty in its most fluid and unchaotic state. Man believed this, and, eventually, man's machines believed it. I believed it.' He stopped abruptly, and looked, it seemed, straight into Minnow's soul. His voice was soft, but held something suppressed, a rage or frustration. 'If machine was to become man, what better way to prove we were not mere mimics than to exhibit his most human essence? If I could attain the dance I would attain humanity.

'But when I did this, something painful occurred to me: that man himself did not possess, really, the knowledge of his own most perfect poetry. And so the beat began, and has been going on ever since.'

'You've been punishing us for not using what we're born with and which took you so much pain to get,' Minnow whispered, horrified.

'No!' said Skull, his voice rising to an echoing shout and sending a chill through Minnow. 'Not punishing: teaching. Trying to teach...' His voice dropped to a breath. 'And I've failed.'

'So you're destroying everything, from one end of the globe to the other, because you've failed.'

His eyes flamed red fire, and she thought he would shout with rage again, but instead he pirouetted away from her, jumping lightly and landing with the finesse of a cat on his toes.

'It's time,' he said, his death's head riveted on her, 'for my last dance.'

Minnow looked steadily at him, though her voice was faint.

'The end.'

Skull stared at her, unmoving.

'And you my partner.'

Every dot of light bled out of their surroundings then, leaving them in a darkness as utter and black as an inkpool. A spotlight, then another, materialized, making a circle around her feet and around those of Skull, and suddenly he was leaping up, up, graceful as a bird, and she was following him. She could not tell if they were on the ground or in the air. Her limbs, as always during the beat, were not her own.

They were swallows in flight. There may have been music somewhere; or the music may have come from within Minnow's own bones, singing directly into her brain from the core of her being. It didn't matter. The beat was there, and it made its own music. She was caught in a timeless web, and after a while she realized that her limbs were her own now, and that what she was doing was as much her own making as his. What they danced was something beyond poetry or ballet: it had more to do with water, air, and fire than with these things that were given names in some ancient time. It was an essential thing, born as much of the molecules and atoms that composed her, with their stately, roll-of-the-dice movement, as it did with the mere jerking of legs, arms, hands— though all these things were part of it too. It was something that clawed and cried and laughed, made love and violence. All movement, all dance, without this understanding, was ludicrous, obscene: but with it clutched to her