PodCastle

* Author : G. V. Anderson
* Narrator : Tatiana Grey
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Previously published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.


Rated: R, for human parts sundered and sold.
I Am Not I
by G. V. Anderson
[Note: This is part 2 of a two-part novelette. Please visit last week’s post to read part 1.]
“You don’t look well, Miss Strohm-Waxxog.”
I shook the bees from my jacket; they’d got cosy in my pockets and inside the lining. “I’m quite well, I assure you,” I said. I didn’t feel well. The walls and furniture around me seemed to move although I stood still, and small noises crashed in my ears.
The honey man had come to fetch Madame hunting, as promised. The days were turning colder, the sun hardly breaking through the early-morning mist. “The perfect conditions. They’ll be sluggish,” said the honey man.
But faced with the sobering light of day and the reality of chasing down real, living Saps, Madame refused. The honey man insisted on a partner, so I found myself stepping out into Tanners Row in her place, keeping pace with the only Varian who’d ever made me feel truly uneasy. At least he wore his veil so I didn’t have to look at his awful face.
“We’re after a full specimen today,” the honey man said. I sent up silent thanks; a full specimen could fetch an excellent price. Perhaps the whole one hundred and fifty guineas, if I did my best negotiating. As we walked farther down the Row, past boarded-up shops and walls of graffiti, he handed me a dartgun.
I turned it over in my palm. “Why don’t your bees just sting them?”
“I asked them to, on my first hunts, but it caused too much swelling,” he replied. “Madame will want to pickle and jar immediately, which leaves insufficient time for the bumps to recede.”
“Asked?” His bees flew around us, perhaps an entire colony. Some of them had landed contentedly on my shoulders, and I’d given up trying to shrug them away. “I thought you and they . . . Do you not control them?”
The honey man laughed. “They do as they like. We have a mutually beneficial arrangement, nothing more: my body provides a strong home; they collect information. They’re spliced, like Varians,” he said with pride. He raised a hand and they danced around it. “They’re clever little creatures, unnaturally strong with an excellent sense of direction. My bees know all the quickest routes through Vak-Ambrah, from the Auxxib district to the harbour and into the heart of the slums. Keep them in your sights and you’ll never be lost.
“And they certainly seem to like you,” he said, his head tipping towards the ones on my shoulders. “Perhaps they have a mind to burrow in and make a new honey girl.”
I swallowed a surge of bile.
The bees led us deeper into Tanners Row. The honey man and I followed close behind, my toes catching on the path. The alleys we took were narrow, the buildings bowed together like lovers’ foreheads, sharing secrets. When I looked up between them, the sky was a distant slash of iron.
We stalked through the slums for much of the day. They appeared abandoned, but energy rippled through every building as though they’d been occupied a moment before and swiftly vacated — dust, stirred by phantom feet,