#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily
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Printed in the a Nebula Awards Showcase, this piece was
named one of the best science fiction or fantasy stories of 2013. It is a
political science lesson played out in apiary terms. A colony of wasps are
forced from their home, so they strike out for new territory. Once they found
it, they looked to conquer:
“Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers
and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are
established here, we will expand.”
And expand they did, taking control of the indigenous bee
population, one that far outnumbered the wasps but were less sophisticated or
practiced in the arts of war and aggression.
One day “By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees
trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchists.” The mutation stuck
and slowly took root among the oppressed colony of bees.
“Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the
daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the
monarchy…A perfect society needs no rulers…knowledge and authority ought to be
held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves
from the structures of both our failed government and the new unjustifiable
hegemony of the wasp nest.”
What followed is chaos, death, insurrection, and revolution,
not in that order. Mistakes are made, but among the smart, they are only made
once, pass it along!
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