Bee Nerds

 

I’m pleasantly meandering my way through a science fiction anthology I picked up from the local library, The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF, and each tale wows me in some little way. True, most have a doomsday vibe, but others often have little nuggets of weird awesomeness that blow me away and give me interesting bits of ephemera to tease out.

Like this one, from “The Bees of Knowledge,” written by Barrington J. Bayley, an SF author whom I have never read:

 

… the Bees are much interested in mathematics, but theirs is of a type that not even he would be able to understand (any more than I could, except intuitively when I was in the grip of the trance). What would he have made, with his obsession with numbers, of the Bees’ theorem that there is a highest positive integer! To human mathematicians this would make no sense. The Bees accomplish it by arranging all numbers radially on six spokes, centered about the number One. They then place on the spokes of this great wheel certain number series which are claimed to contain the essence of numbers and which go spiraling through it, diverging and converging in a winding dance. All these series meet at last in a single immense number. This, according to the theorem, is the opposite pole of the system of positive integers, of which One is the other pole, and is referred to as Hyper-One. This is the end of numbers as we know them. Hyper-One then serves as One for a number system of a higher order.

 

Hyper-One! I love that. This will be forever filed away in my memory as the Theorem of Hyper-One.

“The Bees of Knowledge” is a gentle, weird tale with more than a bit of existential horror tucked in. The “he” mentioned at the beginning of the above excerpt is a man-sized Fly who understands mathematical processes at least up to exponentiation.

And the Bees are ten-foot sized insects that inhabit the planet Handrea, upon which our narrator crash lands, the sole survivor in a malfunctioning life pod from an interstellar passenger ship which unexpectedly explodes. He’s seized and taken by these curious Bees to their hive, which must be something of the size of the Great Pyramid hunched atop Grand Central Station, and spends the rest of his life there. Where does he stand? What he can do to survive, and how can he communicate to these oddly intelligent Bees? We wind up very metaphysical and surreal by story’s end.

Like I stated earlier, I have never read Bayley before (nor had I heard of him). But a quick web search reveals a body of work consisting of at least 16 novels and 87 short stories stretching over a half century (1954 to 2008). His name goes on the Acquisitions List and I will definitely pick up more of his writings should I come across them in my used book store travels.

Hyper-One!