Wing-Script

by McCaffreyan Science Fantasy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The lanterns were writing on the air again, and Inês Furtado took off her glasses to read it.

Without them the orchard went to soup. The pear rows dissolved into green and white smears, the hive stands into grey blocks, her grandmother into a dark shape bent over the fourth hive with the smoker going. But the lights at the hive mouths came up bright. They always did. Each lantern that landed on the alighting board opened its wings and shut them, and for that instant the wings flared violet-white, and in the blur of the flare there were shapes, if she screwed up her eyes: bars, hooks, a little broken ring.

Nobody else in Fajã do Meio saw them. Inês had stopped saying so when she was seven.

"Ai! Diabos te levem!" Avó Graça came back up the row slapping at her neck, the smoker swinging. "Three. Three stings through the veil, and I've worn this veil since before your mother was born." She sat on the upturned crate by the water butt, pulled the veil back and let Inês pick the stings out with her thumbnail, scraping, not pinching, the way she had been taught. The skin was already rising in hard white welts. "Forty years, and they've never been hot. Never. Furtado bees are as gentle as sheep."

"They're saying something," Inês said.

"They're saying they want to kill me." Graça took the glasses out of Inês's apron pocket and put them back on her granddaughter's nose herself, firmly, the arms hooked behind her ears. "Wear them. You'll walk into the butt again."

The world came back, hard-edged and too large, the way it did through lenses as thick as the bottom of a bottle. The lights at the hive mouths dimmed to a faint purplish shimmer and went out.

---

Inês had been born with milk in her eyes. That was how her mother put it, when she put it at all: both lenses clouded white, and the medic in the port town, a good woman with steady hands and no implants to give, had taken the lenses out when Inês was four months old so that the light could get in. There were no replacement lenses on Baixa Verde. There had been none since the founders' stores ran out. So Inês wore the glasses, which were heavy, and made her eyes look huge and swimming to other people, and gave her a red dent on either side of her nose by the end of every day.

And she saw the spots. Purple light on the undersides of leaves. A pale ring at the heart of every pear blossom, like a target, which the medic said was a trick of the scarring. The wing-lights.

"Seeing spots," her cousin Rui used to say, and cross his eyes at her. He had grown out of it. Most people had grown out of it. They were kind to her now in the way people are kind to a cracked jug, which they go on using but never fill quite to the top.

---

The co-op met in the packing shed that evening, because the shed held forty and the co-op house held twelve. It smelled of crates and pear-wood smoke and wet wool, and the year's first blossom stood in a jar on the scales, white and pink, because Senhora Amaral put it there every spring for luck.

Duarte Bettencourt stood by the scales. He was chairman of the co-op that year and every year, a broad, decent, sunburnt man who owned the long terraces above the fajã and had paid for the new road with his own money, and who did not like to be argued with in public because he so seldom needed to be.

"I'm sorry, Graça," he said, and he sounded it. "But it's not only you. João Medeiros was stung on Monday. My boys were stung yesterday walking past your rows, and they weren't near the hives. Your stock's gone hot. It happens. The founders' lines are two hundred years old and they're tired."

"They're not tired," Graça said. "They're upset."

"Bees don't get upset. They get hot, and you requeen them." He held up a paper. "I've written to the mainland. The Porto Novo co-op will sell us twelve queens of their new line, gentle as you like, on the Thursday boat. Twenty-two escudos a queen, and the co-op will stand half. We sulphur your hives Wednesday night when they're all at home, and we put the new queens in Friday into clean boxes."

There was a murmur in the shed. Not an angry one. People nodded. Twenty-two escudos was a great deal, and the co-op standing half was handsome. The Furtado orchards were the lowest in the fajã, the oldest, the last ones on the island still kept by founder stock, and everybody's blossom needed bees.

Inês stood up. Her face had gone hot before she had said anything at all.

"They've got writing on their wings," she said.

The shed was quiet. Somebody's chair creaked.

"There are marks. On the wings. When they open them at the hive door. I can see them without my glasses. They're making the same marks over and over, they have been for two days, and they didn't before." She made herself go on. "I think they're saying something."

Duarte looked at her with great gentleness, which was worse than if he had laughed.

"Inês, filha," he said. "Your poor eyes. The medic told your mother, remember? There'll always be some spots." He turned back to the room. "Wednesday, then. Who'll lend Graça a cart for the boxes?"

Graça did not look at Inês on the walk home. But at the bottom of the hill, where the road turned in among the Furtado pears, she said, not quite to her: "What sort of marks?"

---

The co-op house had been the founders' store, and it still had their door, a slab of grey stuff that was not wood and not stone and had not weathered in two hundred years. Inside, on a stand under a glass case, lay the Livro dos Fundadores. Senhora Amaral kept the key on a string round her neck and turned the pages for anybody who asked, which was nobody, except schoolchildren on Founders' Day.

She raised her eyebrows at Inês, at half past seven in the morning, with the dew still on the steps.

"The keeping pages," Inês said. "Please."

They were near the back: the section on the lanternas, in the founders' cramped old spelling. Inês had seen them on Founders' Day and had thought nothing of them then. Now she read them properly, standing on tiptoe with her nose almost to the glass.

Earth bees did not survive one season under this sun, the founders had written. The lanterns are our answer. They are built to carry their own reports, so that the keeper may know the state of each hive without opening it. The signal-caste displays the reports on the wing in the near-ultraviolet. Read them under the keeper's lamp (stores, shelf 9). Table follows.

And there it was: a table, three pages long, of the shapes she had been half-seeing all her life. Bars and hooks and broken rings, each one printed plainly in black, with its meaning beside it. Queen laying. Queen failing. Brood sick. Forage far. Forage near. Robbers. Cold.

"The lamps," Inês said. Her voice came out strange. "Shelf nine."

"Oh, those went long ago," said Senhora Amaral. "My grandmother remembered the last one. The tube broke, and nobody knew how to make another." She looked at the table, and at Inês. "Is that what you were on about in the shed?"

Inês copied the table into the back of her school exercise book. It took her an hour and a half and both sides of eleven pages. Senhora Amaral brought her a cup of milky coffee and did not say anything else, and when Inês left she stood in the founders' doorway and watched her go all the way down the hill.

---

She went to the hives at the end of the afternoon, when the foragers were coming home heavy and the light lay long and yellow across the rows. Avó Graça was at the far end, mending the fence, and pretending not to watch.

Inês sat down on the grass a metre from the fourth hive, opened the exercise book on her knee, and took off her glasses.

The orchard went to soup. The hive mouth swam with violet sparks. She could see that the marks were there, but they were only blurs, as print was, and faces, and everything else in the world without her glasses.

Then she remembered the medic's card. Every spring when she was small the medic had held a black card up to her bare eye, a card with one pinhole in it, and said read me the letters, and through the pinhole, dim and tiny, the letters had come sharp. It was a trick of light, the medic said. It worked for any eyes at all.

Inês tore a corner off the black cover of the exercise book, took the pin out of her apron bib, and pushed it through, and turned the hole small and round between finger and thumb. She held it to her eye. The orchard shrank to a bright coin, sharp-edged, and in it the wing-lights were no longer sparks. But they were small, and far, and they came and went too fast.

"Come here, then," she said to the hive, feeling a fool. "I can't read you from there."

For a long while nothing came. Lanterns came and went at the board, and the sparks flickered, and her eyes watered. Then one bee left the board and flew straight at her face.

She did not flinch. That was the thing she would remember afterward: that she did not flinch, though a lantern was the length of her top finger joint and its sting was what had put welts on her grandmother's neck. It landed on the back of her wrist, which she was holding up near her face to shade her eyes, and it walked, slowly, ticking with its feet, until it stood a hand's breadth from the pinhole. Then it opened its wings.

The pattern stood out as sharp as print, filling the little bright coin. Violet-white on violet-black. A double bar. A hook. Three dots in a line.

She did not need the book for the first one. She had looked at it so long in the co-op house. Cold. The hook was blossom. The three dots she had to find, holding the book right up beside the bee and turning pages with one hand: three nights.

The bee shut its wings, opened them, showed the same thing again. Cold. Blossom. Three nights. It did it six times. Then it showed a mark she had to hunt for through four pages, while her wrist ached and the bee waited, not moving, its feet pricking her skin. A ring with a gap at the top.

Keeper — attend.

She sat very still. Her throat was tight and her eyes ran, and she let them.

"I see you," she said. "I can see you."

But it could not hear her; lanterns had no ears to speak of. And a bee would not read Portuguese. She thought about that for a while, with the bee waiting. Then she thought about her nose.

There was a tin of zinc paste in her apron. Every child on Baixa Verde carried one in spring, for the sun was cruel at the start of the year and the paste was the only thing that stopped it. Inês had put it on her nose every morning of her life, and had once, at nine, looking in the mirror without her glasses, noticed that the paste had none of the violet sheen her skin had. White to everyone else; to her a dead flat patch, as if a piece had been cut out of her face. It swallowed the violet light. To a lantern, whose eyes were made for that light and blind to red, it would show black.

With her free hand she unscrewed the tin, dipped one finger, and drew on the pale inside of her other arm, carefully, the shape she had found in the table on the last page under Keeper's replies: a single upright bar with a dot above it.

Understood.

The lantern turned round on her wrist and faced the mark. It stood there for a long time. Then it flew, not back to the hive, but up, to the collar of her dress, and settled there under her ear, where she could feel it, a small warm weight and the tickle of its feet against her neck. And all along the hive mouth, as if a lamp had been lit inside, the wings of every lantern on the board blazed violet-white at once.

Inês put her glasses back on with shaking hands. Avó Graça was standing at the end of the row with the hammer forgotten in her fist.

"It's on you," Graça said. "It's sitting on you."

"They say there'll be frost," said Inês. "In three nights. On the blossom."

---

Graça did not believe it straightaway. She was a Furtado and Furtados did not believe things straightaway. She stood looking at the bee on her granddaughter's collar, and then she said, "Ask them which hive went queenless in Lent."

"You know which."

"I know. You don't. Nobody does, I never said. Ask them."

So Inês sat down again in the long grass, took off her glasses, and held up her wrist, and the bee came down off her collar and stood a hand's breadth from the pinhole. She had to find the marks for which and queen and before in the table and draw them in zinc on her arm one at a time. It took the best part of an hour, and it was getting dark. But the answer, when it came, was plain: the bar that meant seven and the mark for queen failing and the mark for new queen, laying.

"The seventh," Inês said.

Graça sat down on the crate by the water butt rather suddenly.

"I requeened it from the third," she said. "Not a soul knew. I was ashamed of losing a queen at my age."

---

Duarte Bettencourt did not believe it either, but Graça had been a member of the co-op for forty-four years and had a voice like a gull when she wanted it, and she stood in his kitchen door at six in the morning until he came out.

"The glass is high and steady," he said. He meant the founders' barometer, which hung in the co-op house beside the Livro and was the only one on the island. "Fair weather. It's been fair all week."

"Fair and clear and still," Graça said. "And what does that give us in spring, Duarte, when the wind drops? You're not a boy. You were here the year we lost the whole crop."

He looked at her for a long moment. It was the year he had been twelve: the year the blossom had gone brown on the trees overnight, every terrace on the island, because the nights had been clear and still, and the cold had come straight down out of the sky with no cloud to stop it, and nobody had been ready.

"We're not lighting fires on the word of a girl with — " He stopped himself. "On a guess."

"Then lay them," said Graça. "Lay them and don't light them. That costs you nothing but a day's work. And put off the sulphur till Friday. If there's no frost by Friday, you can gas my hives yourself, and I'll hold the lamp."

He laid them. Not gladly, and not on every terrace; but the co-op had its old stoves in the back of the packing shed, sixty of them, squat iron pots that burned waste oil and pear prunings, and on the second day the men of the fajã carried them out between the rows and filled them, grumbling. Rui carried four up the Furtado rows by himself and did not cross his eyes at Inês once.

Every evening Inês went down to the fourth hive and took off her glasses, and every evening the bee came out to her wrist. On the second evening the marks said two nights. On the third they said tonight, and a mark she had never seen and had to search the table for, with Graça holding the lamp: severe.

---

At ten o'clock the sky over Baixa Verde was clear as black glass, every star sharp, and the air did not move at all. Inês stood at the end of the lowest Furtado row with her breath smoking. The barometer in the co-op house stood at fair. It had not shifted all day.

At eleven there was rime on the grass along the bottom of the orchard, where the cold air drained down off the terraces and pooled.

At a quarter to midnight Duarte Bettencourt came down the hill with a storm lamp in his hand and stood beside her, and put his bare palm flat on the top of the nearest stove. It was as cold as a stone in a river.

"Light them," he said, not loudly. Then he turned round and shouted it up the hill. "Light them! All of them!"

The fires went up the terraces one by one, little orange eyes in the dark, sixty of them, and the smell of hot oil and pear-wood rolled out through the rows. Men walked between them all night with cans, feeding them. Inês walked with Graça, and at two in the morning, when the cold was worst and her fingers had stopped feeling anything, she put her hand into a cluster of pear blossom by a stove and found it soft and cool and alive. Three rows up, where a stove had gone out and nobody had noticed, the blossom crackled under her fingers like paper.

At dawn the sky went from black to grey to a thin, clean blue, and the frost lay white over every bit of grass that was not near a fire, and the blossom on the lit rows hung in its clusters, unbrowned, while the first sun came over the ridge and caught it.

---

Inês sat on the crate by the water butt with her hands wrapped round a cup of Senhora Amaral's milky coffee, which Senhora Amaral had carried down the hill herself. She was too tired to drink it. Avó Graça had gone to sleep sitting up against the fence post.

Duarte Bettencourt came down the row with the frost crunching under his boots. He had soot on his face and his eyes were red. He stood in front of her for a while, and Inês did not help him.

"The Thursday boat," he said at last. "The mainland queens." He rubbed his face and spread the soot further. "I'll send them back on the same boat. But Porto Novo will want to know why." He looked at the hives. "Would you — would you come up to the co-op house, one evening, and show me the table? And — " He stopped. "And Porto Novo's new line was bred from founder stock, wasn't it. Every line on this world was. If yours can say it, theirs can."

"They've been saying it all along," said Inês. "Somebody just has to get close enough to read."

He nodded slowly and went back up the hill.

Inês set down the coffee. She took her glasses off and put them carefully in her apron pocket, and held the pinhole to her eye, and held up her wrist, and the lantern came down off her collar, where it had ridden all night, through the fires and the cold, and walked up to the place a hand's breadth from her eye, and opened its wings.

She did not need to look the mark up. She knew it by heart already. She looked it up anyway, in the exercise book, because she wanted to see it in black and white.

Keeper, it said.

Inês uncapped the zinc, and wrote on the inside of her arm the single upright bar with the dot above it, and held it up to the sun.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō McCaffreyānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

McCaffreyan Science Fantasy Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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