Jeb breathed in deeply, smelling the grass around him. That, more than anything, reanchored his mind and spirit to his body. Even though bees had their own sense of smell, it was linked to the rest of their actions. For Jeb, the scent of growing life was simply a reminder that he was safe, even if not all of his bees were.
Jeb opened his eyes again, blinking at the sudden influx of light. His eyes once more being single orbs was disorienting, but he quickly remembered where he was. The few members of the Swarm that had taken to remaining next to him at all times were standing their vigil watch. Or, rather, Jeb amended to himself, they were floating their vigil.
Chuckling to himself, Jeb stood and stretched. Even if his body did not necessarily need the movement, he did. It was just one more way that he could remember where the boundaries between himself and the Swarm were.
Thinking about the boundaries, Jeb probed for his lute. Their connection had changed while he was traveling through the eyes of the Swarm. The lute was still Bound to him, and the Binding remained something more than it had been when he entered the Enclave. Jeb was reminded, though, that the lute was not Bound to the Swarm, nor vice versa.
The fact that a part of Jeb was the lute and a part of him was with the Swarm showed Jeb the bounds of himself. It was strange to think of himself that way, but as he stared into the web that his soul was becoming, Jeb saw the strands that connected to the Swarm and those that connected to the lute. Nodes that touched both were the places that were Jeb, much as it was strange to define himself solely in terms of his connections. Something about the idea of being defined in relationship began to eat at Jeb, but he forced the thought aside. He was going to see what life was like from within the Swarm.
Lying down on the grass so that he wouldn’t be jolted back to himself, Jeb reached out a hand to a large bee that was ambling near him. Closing his eyes, he traced the connections between his soul and the bee’s. Jeb was once again pulled somewhere far away.
He was a scout. Unlike the other Hives, who gave their scouts specific grids to search, he was simply to find a place where the Water in the air felt right. Flying with stops only to refuel on a particularly appetizing flower, he searched for the faint flicker of Mana. The trail was inconsistent at best, but he knew that he was growing closer by the day.
The pain that arced through Jeb had taken on a different flavor. Rather than something blinding, it was something almost warming. It told Jeb that he was pushing himself further than he had gone before, though it did not come with any sense of going too far.
Jeb was the Water scouts. Each had their own method for locating the wellspring of Water Mana that the next Hive would call home. They worked together as best they could, communication difficult because of the vast space between them. They had been searching for what their Bound one would have called three months, though the time was irrelevant to the Hive. The new Queen needed a home, and since she had been born of Water, she would have a home in Water.
As though the thought of Water eased the transition, Jeb felt the cold rush of jumping into a river after a long day of work. He pulled back even further, seeing the different scouting expeditions the Hive had sent. The nascent Water Queen, it seemed, was not the only one.
The Hive, even as it had shifted its focus to scouting, still remembered its founding Charter. It was to make the purest forms of Elemental Honey, attempting to embed the Mana so deeply that it became something new. The efforts had not been in vain, as the strength of the young Queens could attest. Still, they were far from being finished.
Jeb found himself back in his own mind for a moment. What had the Hive meant about a Charter? He tried to trace the thought, difficult as it was in the diffuse thoughts of a Swarm. Eventually, he found the connection. The Hive had been established by another, who sent the Queen off with a specific mission.
Dissolving himself back into the river of thoughts, Jeb continued to watch the scouts. Each knew that they had been born for a purpose outside of the Charter. It weighed on them until they learned their role. Expanding the reach of the Swarm was a vocation that ran deeper than any individual Hive’s Charter. No longer ashamed, each of the scouts found themselves suddenly almost proud of the conditions of their birth.
Jeb blinked at the individuality in the bees. He had known that the Swarm was intelligent, even when broken down to the level of individual Hives. As he looked through the eyes of individual bees, however, he saw that there was an intelligence in each one.
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It was nowhere near as complete as his own, of course, but each scouting corps seemed to have its own sense of identity that was only loosely tied to that of the Hive. Back in his own body, Jeb blinked. Why had he thought about the identity in relation to the Hive, rather than to the Queen? It took him what felt like hours to relocate the exact Hive he had been tracing, but Jeb wanted to make sure that his views hadn’t been distorted. He saw the Water scout, the Water scouts, and the scouts as a whole.
Pulling back further, Jeb realized that he was beginning to have a split vision. Part of him was looking through the eyes of the Hive itself, which simply tracked its children. The other part of him had desires and aspirations. That was the Queen, Jeb realized quickly.
Forcing himself into the Queen’s mind, Jeb realized that he had fundamentally misunderstood the Swarm’s intelligence. It was not a Queen commanding the rest of the bees as though they were extensions of her own will. Instead, the Queen seemed like little more than an aggregator, compiling the wants and needs of each bee within the Hive into one cohesive narrative. Being an individual herself, though, Jeb saw that her reports were not always completely free of bias.
She was a Queen born to Fire, and did seem to earnestly believe that the Fire Attuned bees in the Hive were stronger than the rest. Looking through the Hive, though, Jeb found that to be untrue. The fact that the Queen was reporting anything started to gnaw at him, and he tried to find where the Queen was reporting.
Jeb watched a single bee dance and teleport away to a different Hive, sharing news of the improvements that his Hive had crafted and learning the improvements of other Hives. Back at the Fire Queen’s Hive, Jeb saw hundreds of other bees dancing to go off to other Hives. That was clearly at least part of what the Queen was reporting, though something about that answer felt incomplete.
Feeling the warning signs that he had tested the boundaries of his own soul, Jeb pulled his awareness back into his own skin. As painful as all the times he had pushed himself too far at the Academy had been, Jeb found himself glad for them now. They kept him from making the same mistakes again.
Looking at the sky, Jeb saw that only a few minutes had passed. He frowned, concerned at how quickly his soul had been damaged from something that felt so natural. With a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders, he moved on. Regardless of why it had been taxing, Jeb was mature enough now to recognize his own limits and follow them. He spent the remainder of the day talking to Brian, answering the boy’s questions about Magic.
After a night’s rest, Jeb cautiously probed his soul. To his surprise, it seemed even less damaged than it had before he had explored its limits the day before. Smiling, he sought to find the answer to where the Queens of each Hive reported. He lay back and tried to see through not just a single Hive, but the Swarm itself.
The information came at him like a torrent, and Jeb felt his head split in agony. Pulling back slightly, he listened to the voices of the Queens, tuning out the millions of drones. When he did, Jeb felt the knowledge slot into place.
Just as each Hive had its own organization, with groups reporting within each other and to the Queen, so too did each Queen belong to a different network of shifting priorities. The bright points of light pulsed differently as though reflecting each of their roles. The Queens on the periphery of the Swarm's reach seemed most focused on expansion, while those closest to the farm where he had been raised seemed to be dedicated to building defensive structures. All the information, each Queen’s report, though, flowed directly to the Farm.
Jeb saw the Empress, and understood her role. She was, as he had assumed, the voice of the Swarm. She was not, however, the intelligence of the Swarm. Just as each Queen synthesized the data from her own Hive, giving a simple picture up, she took the information from each Hive and crafted a single narrative for the Swarm as a whole. Jeb watched as she gave the order to increase rates of expansion, and noted how many Hives suddenly started feeding royal jelly to their larvae.
The Empress noticed Jeb’s gaze and danced over to where he stood.
The two stared at each other. Jeb could sense tension, as though the Empress had not wanted him to see what he had. Frowning, Jeb asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that this was how the Swarm functioned?”
The bees around the Empress no longer danced to her command. They seemed frozen, torn between loyalty to the Swarm and loyalty to the one who had uplifted the Swarm. The Empress danced hesitantly, explaining that she had at first worked to make sure that he was not burdened with the effort of managing each small decision the Hive made. As the Swarm expanded, so too did her role.
“And then you were worried that we would have conflicting goals for the Swarm,” Jeb reasoned, thinking about the different factions that he had seen.
The Empress hesitantly agreed.
“I can’t say that I blame you, though I don’t appreciate knowing that so many of the Queens’ voices have been silenced. Then again, where do I draw the line? It’s clear that each Queen sometimes ignores the voices of castes within each Hive, and the castes certainly do not do what each individual bee wants.”
The Empress buzzed a suggestion, and Jeb nodded. She would continue to fade back, allowing each Hive’s Queen more and more autonomy. She would also work to make it easier for bees within each Hive to change loyalties. Jeb nodded, satisfied with the arrangement.
As the Empress danced away, however, Jeb realized that he still had another issue to deal with. All the time that he had thought he was speaking to the Swarm, he had really been speaking to the Empress. What would it be like to talk to the Swarm itself.
Jeb opened his mind to the web that connected the bees. When he found the emergent voice of the Swarm, he nudged it, asking to meet. As he felt his knees crumple, Jeb had just enough time to wish that he had sat down first before his vision went dark.