13 - Rotten, Rotten Rotten

With my internet issues lately, it seems that post 10 didn't go up properly and now is somehow out of order.  It is still numbered correctly, so I'll see what I can do tomorrow to fix things.  It is now visible.  Sorry about that.  All fixed and tidy and in order now.  So far I'm still with first person present with Hara... she wants to be so I'll go with it right now.
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I’m not getting out of bed today.  Everything is rotten and wretched and wrecked.  I have cramps.  Kyrus and stepapa and pa and Werfas are all off playing ‘let’s save the world’ and take down Prime and find out what happened to Secundus and other boy’s games.  I've been so grown up and adult for soooo long, I'm tired of it. 

Me... I’m supposed to be this fancy siwion of Milar, this princess from a ‘green and water-rich land’... I’m not kidding.  Some street talker, telling stories with great sweeps of his hands and his little girl who is maybe five... or six... is playing me.

It would have been funny except that the story he was telling had me sitting around getting rescued over and over and over again by Kyrus and his da and my pa and the Emir-al and the Amir.  Like I’m some kind of glass and gold queen bee that can’t hold her own weight up or walk a single step.  I saved their asses a time or two... I'm a great team player, not some thing for them to keep safe, like a child, or a pet... or... like their idea of a queen larva.

The real queens of the Great Hive aren’t helpless like that at all.  They are huge, ten times the size of most other bees, and dangerous and don’t die if they sting you with deadly intent.  They’re also smarter than the worker bees.  Tougher too.  I saw that Nadian guy try and smash one and he couldn’t.  That was part of the reason the hive wouldn’t take him on as a human queen.  He didn’t like bees and couldn’t work with them.

I’m homesick.  I’m so tired of veils and veils and veils and people saying eight things and meaning twenty.  We’re a lot more straightforward at home and people say things to your face not behind your back.

This isn’t my place.  This is wrong in so many ways.  There’s never any moisture in the air.  At home all you need to do is go down into a terraformed valley, right to the bottom or into a tsingy crack and there’s water running down the walls and it’s cool.  Sometimes there’s even snow or ice in the bottom.  There’s a lot of cool, overshaded bits at home and a lot more home green.

I could go down into the canyon I suppose, to any of the thousands of terraces. Or under the city, into the Basin.  Kyrus told me once about how cool it was, when the Basin is full.  It’s supposed to be so dangerous, all those boats and houses and rafts and things floating in the water that aren’t supposed to be there, except for paid permits.

I could go down to where I can see shadows that are blurrier and not so sharp edged.  Green and blue that isn’t toxic.  Up here it's white and red and yellow and orange and that weird bruise-like burgundy.  Even the flowers are all those colours.  Most of the builder bees are those colours.

I hate this and I’m going to stay in bed and not move ever again.  I’ll turn into a block of toxic tear-salt right here in the bed and they can just suffer when I’m gone. Rotten.  Rotten. Rotten.

But that's boring too.  I open one eye. The bees are here.  I pick up one of the queens who has come down to land on me.  She’s got gold flashing eyes and black and gold facets and she looks sharp enough to click as she moves.  Her wings are gold glass and her abdomen is black as jet.  She has yellow gold pollen loaded onto her back legs and scrapes them off onto my hand.

I set her down on my abdomen and flinch when she stings me, right where it hurts.  “OW!”  She shakes her wings at me and walks up onto my chest as I realize things aren’t hurting so much.  She buzzes at me and I know I’m supposed to take what she gives me, it will help.  It’s like I can hear the code, humming and clicking along in my ears, because I’ve closed my eyes.  I take the pollen and swallow it and this time when she stings me, it doesn’t really hurt.  I flinch and yelp anyway.

Her buzz is like she’s laughing at me.  There’s more of the queens here and I think I’ll be able to have a short nap.  I’ll feel better when I wake up.  Maybe I’ll have some solutions to our problems.  Boys.  Shashi says that we’re all working together.  At least now my cramps aren’t so bad.  I’m still a bit homesick.

I suppose Lainz isn’t so bad.  I’m being as much a baby as Homa is.  I’ll have a nap, then I’ll be grownup again.