Interest rates in both countries are rising at an explosive rate. All stock markets have been closed temporarily.
The world economy is faltering and teetering. No – it’s already in a tailspin.
Both countries have cast their grasping, greedy eyes on their vassals in Africa. Somebody has to produce more food.
For years the superpowers have leased the most productive lands in Africa for their own food production. As if sensing this the African honeybee has so far been immune to hive and colony collapse.
So far.
The bees in Africa have not yet had enough.
It might still happen.
It has to happen.
I heard a while ago that the USA is trying to buy some country’s entire peanut crop. Now I’m hearing that what they’re offering in return is weapons because nobody trusts the dollar.
‘They’re getting them for peanuts,’ is the joke going around. But it’s not just peanuts. It’s a huge quantity of high-quality vegetable protein.
The little bee – such an insignificant creature. You’ve suffered through environmental degradation, climate change, genetically manipulated plants, mobile-phone masts, air pollution, the carelessness of humans and slave labour and parasitic infestation through neglect.
Now you’re leaving.
‘Honey, I’m leaving!’ you shout from the doorway.
And, as you go, you turn out the lights.
Or, alternatively, you set the world on fire.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
Forgive me for the break in posts. There’s been a lot of commotion around here, and there’s more to come (you’ll soon be reading about it in the papers). The ARA is about to make a substantial scoop.
Our civilization is built on the bones of animals.
But that has to change.
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USER NAME: Tirsu
I can’t get hold of you. Is your phone broken? I need to talk to you about something.
MODERATOR: E.H.
My battery crashed, but it’s up again. We’ll soon see who’s all hat and no cattle. :-)
DAY SIXTEEN
The idea of moving to the Other Side is no longer a dream it’s a necessity.
A war is coming.
A war bigger than any we’ve ever had before.
Maybe I’ll have to give up the idea of regular visits between worlds. I can’t risk discovery.
But what if I get seriously ill or injure myself and need a doctor? Or just get an awful toothache?
I don’t like pain.
I take the list, which is now several pages long, and add the word medicine.
But there’s no way I can account for all possible illnesses, and I have no idea what pathogens there might be on the Other Side. I don’t want to die of some simple infection if there’s a quick, effective treatment for it in my own world. In that case, I would have to pop in back here and hope that Finland is still in one piece, at least enough so that I could get some antibiotics. If anyone is still making antibiotics.
But what if I bring some kind of illness with me to the Other Side? Something as innocent as chicken pox, like when whites first went to America. They infected the indigenous population with ordinary childhood diseases and left heaps of bodies in their wake. I might accidentally be carrying some teeny, tiny pest on the clothing or plants I bring with me, something that would find a vast new habitat to thrive in.
I shove that and other things I don’t want to think about to the back of my mind in a dense, squirming heap.
This whole damn thing is like that. I can’t rely on anyone, not even my future self.
My future self.
*
As if made to order a new monster rushes into my mind from the nether regions of my brain, newborn, glistening wet, wide awake and unspeakably terrifying.
What if. What if Marja-Terttu’s sudden desire for sex wasn’t just a reflex brought about by the pitiless reality of her loss? What if she wanted to get pregnant?
I try to knock the thought out of my head with a sharp shake. Marja-Terttu’s almost fifty years old!
But that’s nothing nowadays, the monster says. Not in these days of hormone replacement and the increasing lengths of active life – and the monster’s right.
A thought flashes across my mind – maybe she takes royal jelly – and I can’t help but shudder.
Before I met Marja-Terttu I briefly spent time with a woman several years older than me. We went out for dinner and to the theatre a few times. She was elegant and youthful, a lively conversationalist with a quick wit. One of the things I liked about her was that she didn’t have any negative reaction to my bee-keeping hobby – she even seemed to take an active interest in it.
Then one day she asked in passing whether I could get her some royal jelly from my beehives.
Mother’s milk. The substance newborn larvae eat and queens enjoy all their lives to allow them to lay eggs.
This woman wanted it because she’d heard that it could increase performance, promote hormone balance, reduce stress and (she said in an insinuating whisper) improve your sex life.
I hadn’t heard anything that disturbing since I’d learned that some women who are afraid of getting old take injections containing human placenta extract. I’m sure the poor woman still doesn’t know what was wrong when I announced not long after that our dates would be ending.
*
But what about Marja-Terttu?
Why would she choose me?
I don’t really know anything about Jani or his capacity to father a child. They don’t have any children, it’s true, even though Marja-Terttu wanted them so badly. But wouldn’t it have been much easier for her to just find an anonymous donor from a sperm bank? Someone with the genes of a super-athlete or a genius?
But who can fathom a middle-aged woman’s logic? Maybe for some strange reason she wanted to throw the dice one last time, to let me have another stab at it, literally, to try to create another Eero or Erika built from the exact same collection of genes as the son she had lost.
And what if I found out some day?
Find out that in another country practically on the other side of the world the belly of a woman once almost declared infertile had started to swell and grow. That flesh, blood and bone was about to pop out into the world one more time, the dizzying double helix of DNA, hitting me in the soul with a crowbar from across an ocean. Unbendable, unbreakable, indestructible.
A war is coming.
I feel cold. Because now I know why there are no people on the Other Side.
A war bigger than any we’ve had before.
Just forming the thought in my head means that despite my reluctance I’m ready to contemplate it. I’m already ready to choose. To make a decision.
Australia. With the instincts of a queen bee Marja-Terttu has escaped to the furthest corner of the world, a place that might be able to remain separate from all the horror. Where she’ll raise my offspring, safe for now, and when that safety eventually starts to crumble I can ask her, demand of her …
The safety of my child. Another child.
*
I decide to proceed cautiously. Slowly.
I’ll escape completely to the Other Side only when I absolutely have to. I’ll wait. Listen. Keep in touch with Marja-Terttu. I’ll know immediately, instinctively if she has a certain bit of news, wring it out of her by force if I have to.
And if that news comes, once that child is in the world, maybe I’ll demand a paternity test.
But until then I can keep bringing the things I need to the Other Side a little at a time, just in case.
And sensing Eero’s presence, the intoxicating safety of it, the revocation of the irrevocable.
*
I buy a good shovel, a Fiskars axe, a proper knife, whetstone and fire flint. I bring them to the Other Side wrapped in black
plastic to protect them from the weather. I’ll have to build some kind of temporary cache close to the portal where I can keep things.
I go to Hopevale Lake.
The urn has been moved. I can tell. I can feel again that Eero is somewhere in the darkness of the woods, waiting, breathing, almost close enough to touch.
Be patient, son. The time will come when we’ll always be together.
I’m about to climb the ladder back up to the hayloft when my eye notices something behind the ladder, in the spot where the foundation of the sauna would be in my own world. A rise in the ground in a strangely regular shape, under a lush willow bush. Till now I’d thought it was just an ordinary rock, like the rest that cover the ground.
I’m curious. I let go of the ladder and wade through the tall grass to look at it. I carefully move the weeds and moss aside, wanting to put them back later just as they were, without leaving a trace.
Under half a metre of humus I find something black and reddish.
Rust. Rust and soot.
A piece of the sauna stove. And it’s so rusted away that it crumbles in my hand like a meringue, and under it I find something else, the steel door, its surface corroded almost to unrecognizability. Everything I find is covered in a thick layer of black soot.
Damn. The sauna is here at some point, in the future, burned down. No doubt from a lightning strike or wildfire.
Now I know that, too.
I climb up to the loft, pull the ladder up behind me and lower it through the trapdoor into the barn.
And then I hear a voice that scares me so that I almost hit my head against the hayloft ceiling.
‘What in God’s name have you been doing all this time?’
Ari’s voice.
Ari has come into the barn.
‘And what are you doing with the ladder? What the heck are you up to?’
I can’t get a word out but I have to do something, and damn fast. I climb down the ladder, my heart going like a rabbit. I improvise, badly.
‘I moved the ladder thinking I would clean the junk room. Throw some old stuff down from up here.’
Ari’s gaze sweeps across the bark and sawdust-covered floor.
‘But you didn’t clean.’
‘I … couldn’t bring myself to throw anything away.’
This makes Ari laugh, and although I can tell that he bought my bluff I can’t help being reminded again that there’s nothing more hilarious to Ari than other people’s personal weaknesses.
‘There’s something I want to talk to you about. I know that you haven’t been feeling like talking to me, but I think this will interest you.’
He stretches a hand out towards me. Something small and fragile is lying on his palm.
A dead queen bee.
The sight is a punch in the gut. I glance unintentionally at the trapdoor. Oh God. Oh God. I can’t let him into the hayloft now, not for anything.
‘I was out there walking around and I saw that you seem to have an empty hive.’
‘Oh.’ I try desperately to remain neutral.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘All these years fussing over those bugs, and all you say is “Oh”. I’ve been following the news, you know. And besides, I’m the one who made you responsible for the Hopevale bee operation. What if this is colony collapse?’
‘I just checked them a couple of days ago, and everything was fine.’
Hell, no. Here I stand, a fifty-year-old man, being scolded by his seventy-year-old father, with my head lolling, and all the while a terrible secret burning inside me as if the thing lying against my chest isn’t a queen bee but a stolen lollipop.
I stretch out my hand. Try to make my voice authoritative, but it’s almost hopeless.
‘Give it to me. I should send it to be analysed.’
Ari clasps his hand around it and pulls back. I grit my teeth. I have to handle this carefully, damn it.
‘At least come and look at the hives,’ he says, turning and walking out of the barn. I follow him as if on a leash. I can’t let him get away, not with the queen.
I don’t even have to open the hive to know that it’s silent as the grave. Dead. No bodies around it. A clear case. Couldn’t be clearer.
Ari still has the queen in his fist. Ideas flood into my mind. I see myself jumping him, hitting him with my fists, grabbing something to use as a weapon, cracking his skull with it. Dragging his body to the Other Side where no one will ever find it. A brick. I just need to find …
But I can’t do that.
I have a motive. Too much motive.
The blood would stain my clothes.
Of course I could take my clothes and the weapon, the brick or whatever, to the Other Side, wash it clean in the waters of the future Hopevale Lake. But I would still be the prime suspect. They would find traces of Ari’s cursed DNA somewhere on the ground or on me. And then they’d lock me up.
I can’t take the risk. I might never get back to the Other Side.
For two weeks I’ve been just a breath away from patricide, and now I can’t do it.
‘What are you glaring at? Don’t tell me. I know, I know. Why can’t you believe that I didn’t mean it to happen? This hasn’t been easy for me either.’
Ah. He’s talking about Eero now.
I reach my hand out again. ‘Let me have the queen. I know where to send it.’
‘You’re not in your right mind,’ he says. ‘Maybe I should handle it …’
He’ll handle things again. The way he handled things when Eero was about to go to Australia.
If he had just kept his hands off back then none of this would have ever happened. There would be a different reality, and Eero would be in it, a different Eero.
‘Give it to me.’ My voice is low, threatening, ugly.
Ari shrugs, humouring me like I’m a lunatic, which is what he thinks I am. ‘Hell, take it, take it! At least you’ll be doing something.’
He uncurls his fingers and drops the queen into my hand.
I try not to breathe a sigh of relief, try not to squeeze the queen too tightly in my hand. Ari’s already turning to leave, then he stops.
‘Oh, yeah. They said in the village that you bought a new Fiskars axe at the hardware store. Is it any good? Could you show it to me? I’ve been thinking about buying one.’
I close my eyes slowly. Now this. I have to find the right words.
‘You really want me. To show you. The axe.’
Ari tilts his head as the words sink in, and the expression on his face tells me that he realizes that he ought to shut his mouth and leave. Finally.
The queen lies silent in my hand.
*
No matter what I do researchers are coming.
They’ll rush in in a panic with their instruments and sample cases. Ari will eventually initiate it no matter what I do to avoid it or throw him off the trail. And if I leave I won’t be able to stop them.
How stupid of me.
My absence would, of course, be noticed anyway. It’s inevitable that other people besides Ari would wonder where I was. I could say that I was going on a long vacation to Thailand or that I bought a cabin in the Costa del Sol, but it wouldn’t work. People are curious.
A new hive collapse could happen at any time while I’m gone.
And Ari or anybody, perhaps one of the researchers he hires, will find and collect another queen bee, a key, and through some ridiculous coincidence go into the barn with it and climb up to the hayloft.
And then the Other Side will be ruined.
What if I took the hives with me? I could harvest the honey to lighten them, just leave enough for the winter, try somehow to get them through the trapdoor and over to the Other Side. And I could leave with them. I wouldn’t have to explain anything to Ari, or tell him where the eleven hives disappeared to, down to the last frame.
No. I’m already worried enough about the possibility of infecting the place with my own pathogens. I can’t bring along hives that are very likely
to be hiding who knows what parasites and spores.
What if I took the queen out of every hive and brought them to the Other Side one at a time? Would the other bees follow?
Maybe. But I have no idea how or why a hive decides to leave. And if a colony lost its queen the worker bees would just start making a new queen the way they always do, feeding royal jelly to the larvae, and soon enough the hive would be the same as before.
*
I’m sure that nothing could be more welcome to the inhabitants of Earth right now than to find an entirely new, virginal, unoccupied world. How fast they would take it over.
Quick as a flash they would make an inventory of natural resources. Where are the minerals, the undammed rivers, the stretches of land bursting with ancient timber?
I remember the kauri trees in New Zealand with trunks the size of a block of flats. I may have heard about them from Eero. About how they produced the sturdiest timbers for shipbuilding in the world, ships that sailed to the ends of the Earth and spread their infection: greed. And then there were no more trees and no more ends of the Earth.
The Other Side would soon be drawn up and zoned, chainsaws roaring, excavators chewing up the ground.
What kind of strong-arm tactics wouldn’t they use to get in there?
Just think how the developers’ mouths would salivate over the chance to own the undredged rivers of gold and the plots of land to build villas beside them.
Would they sell the land, try to tempt new settlers, or would they make it a place of escape for the wealthy few, a new Eden for those who could afford it, and leave the rest of humanity – poor, dirty, fainting from hunger – to survive however they could in a world laid waste by others?
They would definitely come, with their puffed-out chests and their clover and alfalfa and almond trees. They would enslave those little animals again, would think of them as helpers, as labour, and never realize that it was the bees who had diligently, untiringly worked to take care of them, that the bees were the true, kind-hearted stewards of the entire world.
And how quickly it would all happen.
Where was it that I read about how they calculated that the continent of North America before the arrival of Europeans would have sustained about a couple of million people. Hunters and gatherers mostly, nomads collecting wild rice.