The Seven Gifts (9 page)

No, there were complex reasons, he decided,
for the contentment he felt at sea. And he remembered a night,
running home before a gathering storm, with broken black clouds
racing across a starry sky. His little boat was under sail - a tiny
storm jib for'ard - and she felt like a living thing, roaring and
surfing down the faces of the cresting waves, the spume blown off
by the wind and glinting silver in the starlight. Then she would
sink into the following trough, hidden from the wind by the next
wave he could see climbing against the sky, and everything would go
quiet until that next wave picked them up and bore them skywards,
back into the ceaseless blast of the wind.

He had clung on to the tiller, wet and
miserable, desperately trying to steer a safe course down through
those waves. And he had looked at the blackness around him -
squinting his eyes against the driving spray - and there was no
living thing anywhere. In all of existence there had seemed only
him and the wind and the waves, and the stars.

Up above him, dodging around the fleeing,
fractured clouds, were countless billions of stars; some near and
some far. Some, he knew, no longer existed; yet he could still see
them. Some were about to die, yet he would see them for many years
to come. And he wondered how many were there, whose light had yet
to reach him.

That was not a sky above him, it was a
lamination of time. Layer upon layer of different slices of time,
reaching out beyond his vision, beyond his comprehension.

He had felt very small, and singularly aware
of the sheer enormity of existence and his own tiny part in it.
Beneath that indescribable, endless vista of time and space - and
who knew what else - there was a young boy and his boat, battling
for their lives in a storm; unbeknown to anyone.

But perhaps not? Perhaps someone was up
there, watching over him. It was a comforting prospect; and of no
less value for that.

That experience, he remembered, had made the
nightmare of the storm worthwhile. That vision - of the timeless
immensity of life; the billions of other worlds, on which perhaps
other young boys in small boats battled for their lives in
unimaginable alien storms - had remained with him long after he had
reached the safety of harbour.

And now it had come back to him. Awareness,
the Angel had spoken of - essential to a fisherman; to any seaman
for that matter. That was why he liked being at sea. He had a sense
of awareness out there - of his own being and its relationship with
others. He was conscious of life and death; of feelings and senses;
conscious of values. And that, he suddenly knew, was why the Angel
had brought him fishing - to remind him of that consciousness. For
Consciousness, he realised, was the third gift.

He turned to the Angel, who was leaning over
the transom checking the tension of the warps.

“The third story is about awareness, isn't
it?" He didn't wait for confirmation but carried straight on:
“Awareness of one's own life and the lives of others. Awareness of
relationships; needs and fears, love and sorrow. Awareness of space
and time; events; death, and what lies beyond it. Awareness . . .
consciousness.

“I think the third gift was
Consciousness."

“Yes," the Angel confirmed,
straightening up from the transom. “
CONSCIOUSNESS
was the guardian's
third gift to the Earth.

“The first was SPACE - in which it could
exist; the second was TIME - in which it could change; and the
third was CONSCIOUSNESS - in which it could know.

“These first three gifts give the Earth form
and structure, enabling it to create a suitable environment in
which people can evolve and then grow. The remaining four define
its future, and give the people their purpose." Then the boat
stopped dead, the trawl warps twanging in the water astern of them.
The boy grinned.

“I think you've just found us a rock."

“Oh well," the Angel sighed. “I should have
been aware of that, I suppose." She laughed. “Let's haul the gear
then and see if we've caught anything for our tea."

o ------------------------
o

~
The Fourth Gift
~

Flight of a Honey
Bee

HENRY WAS a small, anthropomorphic honey
bee. He had a startling black and yellow body, covered with hairs
for trapping pollen, and four hard-working, whirring wings. He also
had five eyes, two feelers, six legs, three skins, four lips, four
Malphigian tubes, two mandibular glands, two salivary glands, eight
wax glands, three body segments, a very large multiple brain, and a
sting - among other things. He was, for all his apparent
insignificance, a complex little creature. He was also - being a
worker bee - technically a ‘she', although sexually undeveloped.
However, Henry was an aggressive little honey bee, always buzzing
around, shouting and telling the other bees what to do; which
masculine trait explains both name and pronoun.

Whenever a worker bee returned to the hive
after a hard day searching for nectar, she would perform a ritual
dance to show the others where the best nectar was. Henry was
always around at this time, and the moment he deduced from the
dance where the nectar was he would zoom off at great speed,
cussing and buzzing, little wings whirring madly as he strove to
get ahead of all the others. If another bee tried to overtake him,
Henry would peel off like a fighter-bomber and attack from above,
buzzing with fury. Henry always got to the nectar first.

The other bees grew fed up with Henry, and
one day they sent a deputation to the Queen Bee, asking her to get
rid of him. If she could trap him inside one of the empty cells in
the hive, they said, they could all gang up and cement him in with
propolis. He would die slowly and painfully from suffocation.

But the Queen Bee was a good and just Queen.
She knew that two wrongs did not make a right. However unpleasant
Henry might be, it would not do the other bees any good to behave
in the same way. It was better that they should attempt to pull
Henry's behaviour up to the level of theirs rather than allow him
to drag theirs down to the level of his. This advice, however,
worthy though it was, turned out to be rather theoretical; which is
to say that all efforts to achieve it failed miserably.

Something clearly had to be done about
Henry, before the other bees took the law into their own hands. The
Queen Bee had tried speaking to him personally about his behaviour,
but he just did not seem to realise (or want to realise) what he
was doing. He wanted to be first into everything, and that was
that. The Queen did not know what to do about him.

Finally she decided to go to the Snow Queen
for advice. The Snow Queen was very fond of her bees, and even
fonder of their honey. She did not want anything upsetting them and
reducing her harvest. And she had little patience with anything, or
anyone, that prevented her from getting what she wanted.

“That darned Henry," she scowled, for she
knew him well. He was a menace whenever she went out into the
garden, always buzzing about and getting in her way. If he had not
been such a good worker she would have sprayed him with pesticide
long ago. She could well understand him upsetting the other bees.
Worker or no worker, she could happily dispense with his services,
for a little while at least. Mind you, her dislike of Henry was
reciprocated - he would get in an absolute frenzy when she chased
him with the fly-swatter. “And all I'm doing is going about my
business," he would grumble. There was no love lost between the
Snow Queen and Henry the honey bee.

But the Queen had an idea for removing him
for a while, something that would utilise his energies and at the
same time give them all a little peace in the garden.

She decided to make him the pilot of a space
probe that the kingdom was launching the following week. Its
mission was to explore a strange planet far away on the other side
of the galaxy, and return with as much information as it could.
They had failed to learn anything about it from their telescopes,
as all the signals they had directed towards it had returned
exactly as they had left. It was as though the planet were a huge
reflector.

The mission would take a very, very long
time. Henry would be the ideal pilot. And it would settle the
discontent among the other bees.

And so it was.

With Henry blasted off into space, life in
the beehive became peaceful once more. The Queen laid her eggs, and
the workers scurried about collecting nectar and pollinating the
flowers. They soon forgot about Henry.

Henry sat in the control room of the tiny
spaceship and twiddled his wings. He was bored. There was nothing
for him to do all day but check the instruments and rework the
occasional calculation. And he was lonely, with no-one to shout at
or bully. He wished he was back in the hive. That abominable Snow
Queen had a lot to answer for. He would get his own back on her one
day.

And so the days passed, so many of them, and
Henry sat in his control room twiddling his wings and staring at
the passing stars. They all looked the same. Everything looked the
same. Henry was fed up.

Then finally one day the little space-craft
began slowing down. Henry leapt to his feet and stared out of the
porthole. Right ahead of him was a planet, that grew larger even as
he watched. This must be it, he thought. His little hairy black and
yellow body quivered with excitement. Something to do at last.
Someone to talk to?

It was an odd-looking planet. He couldn't
make out any discernible features at all. It was almost like a
sketch - a rough outline. But it was there. He would soon find out
all about it, then he could get off back home where he belonged. He
would buzz that Snow Queen till she went mad. It was a pleasant
thought.

Very shortly the spaceship landed, and Henry
climbed out to have a look round.

Strange, he thought. He couldn't actually
see anything. It was not that he was blind; he could see all right.
He could see his spaceship, and he could see his boots. But he
could not see anything on the planet. No hills or streams, no
flowers or birds, no grass, not even any ground. He couldn't
actually see any planet, and yet he knew he was on it because there
he was, standing right next to his spaceship. It was very odd.

Any other honey bee would probably have gone
back to the spaceship and sat down with a cup of tea to think about
it. Not Henry.

He looked around him, then bellowed at the
top of his voice: “What the hell's going on here, then?"

The reaction was both unexpected and
violent. Henry found himself lying flat on his back with a deep,
booming voice reverberating in his ears:

“What the hell do you think is going on
here?"

Henry came up buzzing angrily, fists waving
in the air; shadow-boxing, for there was no-one there. He stood
still for a moment, mystified, and glared around him. But there was
no-one to be seen, not even a planet. There was just Henry and his
spaceship, perched on a planet that he could not see. And somewhere
a voice, that must have come from something he also could not see.
He felt a tiny shiver of, not quite fear, but something close to
it.

But Henry was no coward. He squared his
shoulders defiantly and called again:

“Who the hell are you, anyway?"

He was back on the ground, ears ringing with
pain.

“Who the damned hell do you suppose you
might be?" the voice was saying slowly, in harsh, biting tones.

Henry was frightened now. This was quite
beyond his ken. But he was also angry. And he could see a large
stone lying by his hand.

He leapt to his feet and grabbed the stone,
then hurled it mightily in the direction he thought the voice had
come from.

“Cop hold of that then," he yelled, and
braced himself for a reply.

For a very long moment nothing happened.
Then he heard the voice, low and menacing:

“I did, and you can have it back."

Henry felt a crash on the back of his head;
stars flew round in his eyes, then he fell to the ground
unconscious. The spaceship watched him, but said nothing. As did
the little man.

Henry came to lying on the ground where he
had fallen. His head felt as though he had run into a brick wall,
and his temper was not one bit improved. He sat up and looked
around him. Nothing; not even the planet that his feet told him he
was standing on. Just the spaceship standing there, silent and
impassive.

He looked at the spaceship, then stared hard
at it for some minutes.

That's it, he thought. That's it! His eyes
gleamed with sudden recognition. Then he jumped to his feet,
pointing at the spaceship.

“You!" he yelled, his voice quivering with
anger. “You're the culprit. Those blasted bees rigged all this, set
me up for you. Just 'cos they don't like me." He cast around wildly
for another rock to hurl at the spaceship. The little bee was
shaking with rage. The spaceship sat on its legs, unmoving and
unmoved.

Then the voice returned.

“Here's a rock, you stupid little cretin."
The voice was laughing at Henry, who stood rigid, rock forgotten,
staring at the spaceship. But the voice did not come from the
spaceship. Its next utterance made that chillingly obvious.

“Here's a nice big rock," the voice chortled
maliciously. “Throw it at your spaceship. Wreck it. Then you'll be
stuck here forever."

Henry could feel a large boulder pushing its
way into his hand. He stood stock still, petrified, willing the
thing to go away.

The voice cackled.

“Lost your bottle, Henry? D'you want me to
throw it for you? I'll smash that spaceship into a thousand pieces,
then there'll be just you and me, till eternity. What d'you say,
Henry?"