Hive

But Lind was just shaking his head, a funny light in his eyes now like a reflection from a mirror. “We’re rising now . . . the hive is rising now . . . through the water and ice into the green glowing sky . . . thousands of us into the sky on buzzing wings, thousands and thousands of wings. We are the hive and the hive is us. We are the swarm, the ancient swarm that fills the skies . . . “

“Where are you going?”

“Above, up and up and up into them clouds and thickness, sure, that’s where we go . . . up beyond into the cold and blackness and empty spaces. The long, hollow spaces, long, long . . . “

“Where are you going? Can you see where you are going?”

Lind’s breathing had slowed now to barely a rustle. His eyes were glazed and sleepy and lost. The air in the room no longer stank like bleach. It was cold, very cold suddenly. The temperature plummeting until a bone-deep chill settled into Hayes. Sharkey killed the fan and cranked the heat up, but it was barely keeping an edge on that glacial cold. Hayes could see his breath coming out in frosty plumes.

“There are winds,” Lind said in a squeaky whisper. “We drift on the winds that carry the hive and we dream together . . . we all dream together through the long, black night that goes on and on and on . . . nothingness . . . emptiness . . . only the long, empty blackness . . . “

Lind stopped talking. In fact, his eyes drifted shut and it seemed he had gone out cold. He was sleeping very peacefully. He stayed that way for ten or fifteen minutes while Hayes and Sharkey could do nothing but wait. About the time Hayes decided to pull his hand free, Lind gripped it and his eyes came open.

“The world . . . the blue world . . . the empty blue world . . . this is where we come, this is where the hive goes now. Oceans, great oceans . . . black, blasted lands . . . mountains and valleys and yellow mist.”

Hayes knew where they were now. They could be nowhere else. “Is there anything alive there, Lind? Is there any life?”

But Lind was shaking his head back and forth. “Dead . . . dead . . . nothing. But the hive, the hive can seed it . . . create organic molecules and proteins and the helix, we are the makers of the helix . . . we are the farmers, we seed and then we harvest. The primal white jelly . . . the architect of life. . . we are and have always been the farmers of the helix, the hive mind, the great white space, the thought and the being and the structure and . . . the helix . . . the perpetuation of the helix, the surety and plan and the conquest and the harvest. . . the makers and unmakers . . . the cosmic lord of the helix . . . the continuation of the code the helix the code vessels of flesh exist to perpetuate the helix only exist to perpetuate and renew the helix the spiral of being... the primal white jelly... the color out of space... “

Hayes tried to pull away now, because something was happening.

Lind’s eyes were now black and soulless and malevolent, filled with a dire alien malignancy. They were black and oily, yet shining brightly like tensor lamps. They found Hayes and held him. And those eyes, those bleeding alien cancers, they did not just look through him, they looked straight into the center of his being, his soul, coldly appraising what they found there and contemplating how it could be crushed and contained and converted into something else. Something not human, something barren and blank, something that was part of the hive.

Hayes screamed . . . feeling them, those ancient minds coming at him like a million yellowjacket wasps in a wind tunnel, punching through him and melting away his soul and individuality, making him part of the greater hole, the swarm, the swarm-mind. He tried vainly to pull his hand out of Lind’s grasp, but his muscles had gone to rubber and his bones were elastic. And Lind was like some incredible generator, arcing and crackling, electric flows of energy dancing over his skin in pale blue eddies and whirlpools.

And that energy was kinetic. It had motion and direction.