Unnatural Creatures

He stooped down, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size, and, pulling a pencil from his pocket, poked at the thing. The pencil went into the darkness for about a quarter of an inch, and then stopped. He jabbed at another point, this time penetrating a good, full inch.

“You see,” said Sir Harry, standing. “It does have a complex kind of shape. Our eyes can perceive it only in a two-dimensional way, but the sense of touch moves it along to the third. The obvious implication of all this length, width and breadth business is that your plant’s drifted in from some other dimensional set, do you see? I should imagine the original spot was its seed. Am I making myself clear on all this? Do you understand?”

Archer did not, quite, but he gave a reasonably good imitation of a man who had.

“But why did the accursed thing show up here?” he asked.

Sir Harry seemed to have the answer for that one too, but Faulks interrupted it, whatever it may have been, and we shall never know it.

“Oh, sir,” he cried. “It’s gone, again!”

It was, indeed. The carpet stretched unblemished under the three men’s feet. They looked about the room, somewhat anxiously now, but could find no trace of the invader.

“Perhaps it’s gone back into the dining room,” said Sir Harry, but a search revealed that it had not.

“There is no reason to assume it must confine itself to the two rooms,” said Sir Harry, thoughtfully chewing his lip. “Nor even to the house, itself.”

Faulks, standing closer to the hallway door than the others, tottered, slightly, and emitted a strangled sound. The others turned and looked where the old man pointed. There, stretching across the striped paper of the hall across from the door was:

“This is,” Archer said, in a choked voice, “really a bit too much, Sir Harry. Something simply must be done or the damned thing will take over the whole, bloody house!”

“Keep your eyes fixed on it, Faulks,” said Sir Harry, “at all costs.” He turned to Archer. “It has substance, I have proven that. It can be attacked. Have you some large cutting instrument about the place? A machete? Something like that?”

Archer pondered, then brightened, in a grim sort of way.

“I have a kris,” he said.

“Get it,” said Sir Harry.

Archer strode from the room, clenching and unclenching his hands. There was a longish pause, and then his voice called from another room:

“I can’t get the blasted thing off its mounting!”

“I’ll come and help,” Sir Harry answered. He turned to Faulks who was pointing at the thing on the wall like some loyal bird dog. “Never falter, old man,” he said. “Keep your gaze rock steady!”

The kris, an old war souvenir brought to the house by Archer’s grandfather, was fixed to its display panel by a complicatedly woven arrangement of wires, and it took Sir Harry and Archer a good two minutes to get it free. They hurried back to the hall and there jarred to a halt, absolutely thunderstruck. The

was nowhere to be seen, but that was not the worst: the butler, Faulks, was gone! Archer and Sir Harry exchanged startled glances and then called the servant’s name, again and again, with no effect whatever.

“What can it be, Sir Harry?” asked Archer. “What, in God’s name, has happened?”

Sir Harry Mandifer did not reply. He grasped the kris before him, his eyes darting this way and that, and Archer, to his horror, saw that the man was trembling where he stood. Then, with a visible effort of will, Sir Harry pulled himself together and assumed, once more, his usual staunch air.

“We must find it, Archer,” he said, his chin thrust out. “We must find it and we must kill it. We may not have another chance if it gets away, again!”

Sir Harry leading the way, the two men covered the ground floor, going from room to room, but found nothing. A search of the second also proved futile.

“Pray God,” said Sir Harry, mounting to the floor above, “the creature has not quit the house.”

Archer, now short of breath from simple fear, climbed unsteadily after.

“Perhaps it’s gone back where it came from, Sir Harry,” he said.

“Not now,” the other answered grimly. “Not after Faulks. I think it’s found it likes our little world.”

“But what is it?” asked Archer.

“It’s what I said it was—a plant,” replied the large man, opening a door and peering into the room revealed. “A special kind of plant. We have them here, in our dimension.”

At this point, Archer understood. Sir Harry opened another door, and then another, with no success. There was the attic left. They went up the narrow steps, Sir Harry in the lead, his kris held high before him. Archer, by now, was barely able to drag himself along by the banister. His breath came in tiny whimpers.

“A meat eater, isn’t it?” he whispered. “Isn’t it, Sir Harry?”

Sir Harry Mandifer took his hand from the knob of the small door and turned to look down at his companion.

“That’s right, Archer,” he said, the door swinging open, all unnoticed, behind his back. “The thing’s a carnivore.”

2

I keep bees. Or at least, there are seven hives of bees in my garden. (Yes, the honey is wonderful, and yes I’ve been stung, but not very often.) The strangest thing about the bees and wasps in this story is that all the natural history is quite right (E. LILY YU knows her bees) but it’s still, well, unnatural. Lily won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Also, she sings in elevators.

In this story we encounter the mapmaking wasps of Yiwei and the colony of bees they see as their natural servants….

FOR LONGER THAN ANYONE COULD REMEMBER, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw.

Much later, after he had been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope.