Invisible Beasts Page 2
ON A COLD SPRING NIGHT in the Pleistocene, in the midst of forests rubbing like bear pelts against the flinty stars, a bolt of lightning locked onto heaven and earth and staggered in its violent light that froze an entire horizon of shadows. Minutes later, a banner of fire unfurled, smoked, and sank under rainy gusts. In its place lay the ruins of a pitch pine, still hissing, alive with crawling sparks. Some chunks of pine had exploded off the burning boughs, showering hot ash, and smacked into the undergrowth like arboreal meteorites. One had rolled into the mouth of a dire-wolf den whose occupants were out hunting. Bumping downward, smutched with wolf hairs, jiggling from residual steam in its pitch that jetted it first one way, then the other, it sped over claw-marked dirt and fell ten feet, whoosh, down a crack leading from the wolves’ den into the true pores of the earth. It landed in a pocket of rock as a pinball lands in its hole, and there, with mass subsiding and heat sighing away, it rested for twenty-five millennia.
At first, the thread of steamy incense unraveling at the back of the den caused anxious sniffing from the mother of four dire puppies, who all grew up safely but never experienced, in hundreds of miles of travels, a fragrance anything like their home den’s. Eventually, the den lost the incense smell and, forever, the scent of dire wolves. Gray wolves, red wolves, and timber wolves took their place for a span of time equal to the lives of empires; then coyotes, foxes, groundhogs, and skunks (thanks to the spread of a human empire) overran the burrows of the wolves. By this time the innumerable pines that had bristled in the cold spring lightning were mostly flattened into rivers of asphalt. But the ancient, charred chunk—a great artwork waiting for its audience—stayed intact through the eons, slowly hardening. I should say a word about it.
It was unique. Before being coated in molten pitch, it had clung to a pine branch onto which it exuded a shiny ooze meant to repel weaver ants, though there were no weaver ants anywhere around. It didn’t know that. It clung to its spot: a rough sphere that from a short distance gave the impression of fruitlike translucence, varying with the sunbeams from rosy-peach to yellow amber. Up closer—from the perspective of a giant ground sloth—it got strange. The sloth had no concept of “beehive,” much less “hexagon,” though a golden ball composed of Tiffany-like translucent grids gave him as much pause as could be sustained by a hungry, incurious guy with claws like personal forklifts. One thing the sloth knew: it smelled good. The next thing he knew, he was galloping about on his massive knuckles, making the sound (whatever it was) of Eremotherium harassed by wasps. He felt wasps, he heard wasps, wasps stung his ears, drilled up his snout, stabbed at his bony little eyes—but he didn’t see any wasps. He left in a hurry anyway. And a defensive swarm of invisible honeybees returned to crawl over their comb in four-bee-thick cosiness, though they had no business to be (or bee) in North America. But they didn’t know that.
These bees were naive newcomers. Their comb, scarcely secreted into place, came there by sheer accident. Natural selection can magnify an accident into a new variation on the theme of life, or let it dwindle into extinction. For all our bees’ sloth-banishing activity, they had little defense against dangers like bears—those Pleistocene bears tall enough to have ambled into your house and scratched their chins on top of your Christmas tree. And they had no defense against a North American winter. They were running out of time.
Invisible, or Parfumier, Bees are natives of Asia, where they likely sprang from the oldest lineage of honeybees, the red-bellied dwarf honeybee, Micrapis florea. Though noble in their antiquity, Micrapis have never been the brightest bees on the planet—they never learned to waggle-dance, for example. Our invisible Micrapis, marooned on a cold, alien continent, never considered sheltering in a cave or hollow tree. Dim aristocrats that they were, they built on a pitch-pine limb the same fragile pavilion that suited their queen in the home latitudes of cinnamon, vetiver, and pepper. They danced their same, waggle-less, straitlaced beeline, pointing to nectar sources of which they knew absolutely nothing. Out and back they flew, and one can only imagine the discomfort of this genteel sisterhood on finding their honeys and jellies altered beyond repair. Everyone performed her duty: the foragers danced, the cleaners swept and garnished, the porters ported, the nurses nursed, and the queen’s attendants licked her constantly and sped her commands to the colony. Yet nothing smelled right. Their beautiful comb, that sweet home epitomizing the best of vigorous feminine care, reeked of poor levulose levels and unpleasant ratios of copper to manganese. Social insects all agree that life bows to a well-executed plan, so the Parfumiers, confronted with seeping evil, continued to do what they did best, with emphasis. They ranged farther; gathered more data; memorized new landmarks. They pioneered! Veteran foragers—bees of experience, whose antennae alerted to the slightest trace of sugar, who could sniff the very hour at which a flower had unfolded—these exquisitely discriminating Parfumiers got their tongues trapped in heavy-duty, spring-loaded sepals meant for the oversize jabs of hummingbirds. They hauled the icy-tasting pollens of the temperate zone. They scaled saber-toothed roses, mandibular violets, grasses that could saw through a glacier’s toes. They were as brave as brides.
Yet despite exceptional industry, the honey of the stranded Parfumiers smelled more and more odd. It nourished them, roughly, but somewhere in its aromatic heart lurked an indigestible dissonance, where the chemistries of received wisdom wrestled with the nectars of circumstance. And their time was running out, though they didn’t know that.
They knew the supreme truth of bees: honey is collaboration. The taste of honey is the taste of sisterhood. Everybody involved in making honey has to agree about such technical matters as the quality standard, when to stop regurgitating the refined product, how long to fan off the excess water, and so on, with many other decisions we’re not aware of as we pour the stuff all over our granola. Unlike us, bees have a sound mass mind, so good at collective decisions that they don’t even need to be conscious of them. It is also a mind capable of abstract thought. Bees know the concepts of sameness and difference, and the Parfumiers, in their rude spring of exile, had brought home a string of unknown ingredients, one after another, trying to make their honey the same as it used to be. Their approximations tasted like approximations, but each was slightly different from the one before. Then something extraordinary happened, simply because it had to. A point came when the Parfumiers’ honey wasn’t a failed version of the same one they used to make, but a whole new thing. I couldn’t say if the Parfumiers’ mass mind consciously read out a royal proclamation to the effect of “Our honey is not the same—then let it be different.” But anyone, even a social insect, who tries to realize a plan through successive approximations is eventually bound to realize not the plan itself, but the sum of the differences between plan and reality. That is the procedure of artists, and the invisible bees, working with unknown materials, had produced a great artwork of the olfactory senses. No one could have identified its resemblances to a flower, or even a potpourri of several flowers. Nothing in nature had smelled like it before. Imagine, however, some unlucky person who would die without ever having encountered a flower, a person whose footfalls regularly met cement, whose raised eyes bumped off a dead layer of clouds, whose hopes consisted of daily crusts, and whose fears were so familiar they couldn’t be bothered to wear faces. Smelling the Parfumiers’ honey, that sad soul would know precisely what a flower was and what it meant—the heart of change that makes hope possible. Our bees had become like the invisible sisterhood of the Muses: their honey was pure poetry.
BEWARE GREATNESS! Like all art of the highest order, the Parfumiers’ unmasked, gently but implacably, our human imperfection. It happened this way:
Twenty-five millennia after a pitch-coated honeycomb fell into a hole under a dire-wolf den, I was enjoying a bright spring morning. I was buttering toast. Patches of sunlight danced on the kitchen counter, where a smudge of raspberry jam drew a bee through the open window—she flew past my ear, grazing it with her hot hum.
My other ear pressed to the cell phone, I listened to my sister Evie. Most people’s voices saw up and down when they’re excited, but Evie’s voice separates into identically-sized syllables all simmering at the same high, maximally efficient pitch, like water heated in a warm pan until convection bubbles, those exactly hexagonal bubbles, cover the surface and simmer according to the same laws of physics that command hexagonal cells in a beehive. I think it’s nice for a biologist’s voice to exhibit one of nature’s fundamental patterns. My sister was telling me about a honeycomb, miraculously preserved from the Pleistocene, complete with the bodies of an unknown, primitive species of Micrapis.
“‘My crap is’?”
“Apis, bee, micro, small, Sophie! Anyway, my graduate student has been running this mummified honeycomb through batteries of tests,” Evie continued, her tone implying that I was intellectually limp though still good enough for her news. She and her student had built models of the dead bees through digital simulation, and, finally, had synthesized a replica of the ancient honey, based on melissopalynological and paleobiochemical analysis. Typically, Evie pronounced these terms without lessening the rate and pitch of her speech. She invited me to visit her lab.
“It’s super-incredible. Wait till you smell it.”
“Smell what?”
“You won’t believe your nose.”
POSTERS OF BRIGHTLY DYED microorganisms, like creepy crawly clerestory windows, decorated the door to Evie’s lab. My baby sister was perched on her swivel chair, at her sprawling bench. Her bangs flipped joyfully at the ends of her sentences. Before I got to see her digitally simulated bee, she insisted that I take a sniff of the reconstructed Pleistocene honey.
“This isn’t a prank? It’s not some kind of drug?”
“I would never give an already crazy person a drug. Come on,” she coaxed, handing me a sealed Pyrex retort, its interior coated in small brown beads.
I put my nostril, as instructed, to a tube hanging from the retort, pressed a tiny plastic catch, inhaled, and let out a long whistle. I pressed the catch again, and again, eyes closed, drawing the fragrance into my memory as hard as I could. “That’s enough,” Evie warned. “We have to limit its exposure. Sorry—I know it’s tempting.”
“Don’t you think . . . it smells a bit like . . . Joy?” I asked.
“Smells like freakin’ paradise.”
I explained that Joy is a perfume, and Evie shrugged.
“How would I know about French perfumes, with the gorilla I’m married to? Let me show you this bee . . .” She brushed the computer keys. On the monitor, the bee’s foot-long image was reddish and furry. Magnified again, her fur resembled tangles of raspberry cane. “The branched hairs mean she was a good sticky pollen collector. But what was she doing here, Sophie? Honeybees didn’t arrive on this continent till the Pilgrims brought them, and they sure didn’t bring Micrapis. That’s an Asian bee.”
I looked at the bee, then at my sister, temporarily unable to speak. Scientists are animals too, and if you trigger their instincts, you have only yourself to blame. Images flew past on the monitor; Evie was scouting for a scent.
I was thinking of the Keen-Ears. They are a thriving species of invisible humans, and some of their clans live in caves in my woods. The Keen-Ears tolerate me as a harmless snoop; they don’t understand why I’ve posted signs on their perimeter and check it daily, with my dog, for evidence of trespass. They have no idea how I’ve fought on zoning boards to keep their habitat untouched, and their existence unsuspected. Unworried, they go about their invisible business, tending their red, furry bees that made the dangerous trek with them—preceding Homo sapiens by some twelve millennia—out of Asia, across the frigid marshes of Beringia, and down into a land of giant bears and sloths, a lonesome immensity where (as their mournful ballads recount) a beating human heart sounded as loud as thunder and lightning.
The Keen-Ears would not know what I did now. I was making a decision.
Evie lacked one clue to solve her mystery, and it was this: when they die, invisible beasts become visible. (Their bodies go unnoticed, blending into the endless ranks of unknown species.) With that clue, Evie would realize what her Asian bee was, and how it had come to America in the bee-baskets of the primordial Keen-Ears. One word from me, and science could open the vaults of invisible life.
But what would happen to animals impossible to see until they died? The outlook was not good. Humans are not like bees; we did not evolve from predatory wasps into dancing, vegetarian beings whose honey tastes of sisterhood. Humanity’s first reaction to the news would be to go out and kill—kill what we couldn’t see and didn’t understand. Before my mind’s eye rolled a vision of Keen-Ear bodies flung in heaps, tied to truck fenders, stuffed and mounted as trophies. I imagined the TV talk shows and the shrieking Web. I imagined the Keen-Ear survivors, sad toys of defense research, dragging on their lives in sunless laboratories. As for their Parfumier Bees . . . as colonies of visible honeybees went on collapsing, some entrepreneur would doubtless try to farm the invisibles, God help them. Or they might go feral again, in a world ridding itself of wild bees. These horrors were the likeliest result of giving Evie the clue she lacked.
Yet I owed my sister. She had never belittled my invisible beasts; no, she had always helped me to understand them. She was a cherished guide on the obscure track I pursued in life. And I owed science a debt, too, for giving me, since childhood, my inspiration and a standard of truth.
That is what I imagined, and pondered, while Evie knitted her brows and gazed at her computer screen.
“This bee of yours,” I said, steadying my voice, “it’s extinct, of course.”
“Well, look at it—it’s practically a wasp. It’s not far from its wasp progenitors, and it’s very, very far from a modern bee. I can’t imagine it’s still around. But,” Evie said, nailing me with a look, “nature is usually about what we can’t imagine.”
3
Here (with apologies to Evie) I describe the Keen-Ears, an invisible human subspecies with unusual gifts, whose clans I am privileged to shelter in my woods. The most memorable lesson I’ve learned from them concerns an ancient problem that our species share, and that they approach by emulating ants—no, it’s not about hard work or planning ahead . . .
The Keen-Ears
WE HUMANS ARE NOT ALONE. A few subspecies of our kind survive in the dangerous company of Homo sapiens by being invisible. The Keen-Ears live in woodlands east of the Rockies and cultivate the edible tree fungus Laetiporus, or chicken-of-the-woods, which causes wood rot but is considered a delicacy by both visible and invisible humans. The Keen-Ears are master fungus breeders; they create many invisible strains of Laetiporus, puzzling some foresters, who can see that a log is rotting, all right, but cannot see why. Visible Laetiporus looks like an orange brain. In the invisible varieties, the Keen-Ears have bred a palette of colors—teal, mauve, scarlet, ice pink, purple—in concentric, paisley, striped, and marbled designs. Wisely, the Keen-Ears have tampered with visible Laetiporus to keep it from breeding with its glamorous invisible cousins. They don’t want any episodes of Homo sapiens stumbling onto a psychedelic fungus protruding from a tree trunk, finding out why, then killing or enslaving all the Keen-Ears. With some remorse—because they’re serious about bioethics and believe in sharing the benefits of science—the Keen-Ears think they are justified in keeping their fungus farming secrets from us. They think we mostly prefer mushrooms, anyway.
The Keen-Ears are short, slight, furred, and have large ears that make them look like Hermes in his winged helmet. Their fur is gray and weather-resistant, so they go naked, with a double pelt in winter. Their ears are so keen that they can hear blood coursing through the body’s vessels. Not even the Great Horned Owl can float by them unnoticed; they hear its pulse beating over the treetops as it readies the mouse-sized cage of its claws. This special gift has countless ramifications, most of them enviable.
Among the Keen-Ears, you never see two people tryi
ng to move out of each other’s way, apologizing as they both step right or left at the same time. The Keen-Ears can detect the sound of muscles tensing for a movement—like dogs, they can tell when you’re about to get up, or leave the room. At mealtimes, eerily, they share a salt dip without a word or glance from the person offering or accepting. What’s more, each person has a blood-signature which sounds as unique to them as a voice to us. A Keen-Ear lying with eyes closed under a feather blanket knows exactly which child is creeping barefoot to the fried fungus jar. They also hear the turbulence that anger causes, and know the combinations of blood-sound and body language for a wide range of feelings. Living as they do in small clans, their minds are nearly as naked as their bodies. (This makes fistfights challenging, though feasible.) They sometimes talk on algae-powered telephones, but such bloodless communication is called “corpse talk” and viewed as an unseemly necessity.
They have epic songs about the dangers awaiting small, isolated genetic groups like their own clans. The verses they intone, while doing chores in their caves, tell of beasts who selected themselves into an evolutionary cul-de-sac, or outgrew their niches. The Keen-Ears don’t particularly enjoy these mournful lays, but insist that their daily performance is vital to “good health.” They call us “Flu-huggers,” and say that we have poor bodily health because we don’t sing the tales of the species gone from our habitats. Curiously, the Keen-Ears’ songs really do help them prevent disease. The ancient melodies were composed to harmonize with the bloodstream—with the boom of stretched atria or the arpeggios of squeezed capillaries—and the Keen-Ears “play” their blood pressure like an instrument, through biofeedback, while singing. This is very good for their hearts. They also diagnose vascular illness with astonishing precision. From eavesdropping on their gossip, for instance, I learned about my illness long before a doctor noticed anything—“that old snoop with arterial plaque,” they called me. (Admittedly, I see the Keen-Ears more often than doctors.)