Samantha Honeycomb

by Scott Zarcinas

  This is the work that earns our bread!

  Left, right, left, right.

  Sector Manager 8473991B stopped outside a guarded door. Atop was a sign: THROUGH SEWING COMES FREEDOM. “It’s in here,” she said, raising her voice over the chanting.

  One for the sunshine!

  One for the snow!

  This is the way we patch and sew!

  Left, right, left, right.

  She mumbled a password to the guards and they opened the doors. The noise roared out:

  We are the ants that mend your pants!

  Left, right, left, right.

  We never say never

  And we never say can’t!

  Left, right, left, right!

  Whether we sleep,

  Or whether we fight,

  We sew all day and we sew all night!

  In a chamber larger than the Procruste Ant Inc. Great Hall, rows upon rows upon rows of ants sat sewing, needle and thread in one claw, sewing item in the other. Between the rows were high mounds of finished articles: antennae warmers, overalls, and other items of apparel. In regimented fashion, the ants sewed to the rhythm of their chants. In went the needle. Out went the needle. In went the needle again. Not one ant missed a beat.

  “This is just one of our sewing factories. There are literally hundreds throughout the anthill,” Sector Manager 8473991B shouted. “All of them are using the cotton thread you’ve spun. As you can see, the war effort’s progressing marvellously.”

  “Why do you need so many clothes?” Samantha asked, also shouting. “Wouldn’t spears and shields and armour be more useful?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” the sector manager shouted, shaking her head. “The arms market is dead. It’s clothing we need. We’re fighting a rag trade war, not a territorial one.” She then gestured toward the factory floor and smiled proudly. The ants kept sewing and chanting. “Our splendiferous Leader taught us that we must fight our battles on the economic front. We must sacrifice everything in our pursuit of honey. Profits are the only way to appease the God of Science.”

  The sector manager then ushered Samantha and Lizzie back to their new quarters. “I want you to think about what you saw today,” she said before leaving, “because I have a proposal for you. I want you to consider setting up a spinning factory. You’ll both be sub-managers in your own right, although only second-class, but it’ll be worth your while, believe me.”

  Lizzie was visibly excited. They could use McCoon Silk Industries as a model, she told Samantha later. “Just think of it. Our efficiency rating will be out of this world. We’ll double the war effort single-handedly. The profits will be huge.”

  Samantha agreed to at least give it a try, keeping her reasons to herself. It would be a great cover for the escape plan she had begun to formulate.

  IT WASN’T LONG before the first spinning factory known to the ants was established: Procruste Ant Cotton Inc. Samantha and Lizzie were given honorary sub-managerial positions and separate sleeping quarters. In addition, a personal security guard was assigned to each of them, though Samantha disliked Lieutenant 7725695P immediately. Although he allowed her a certain degree of privacy, she was always aware of his presence, whether he was waiting just outside her door, or whether he was watching her in the factory, silent and broody. The measure was for her own safety, or so Sector Manager 8473991B said, but Samantha had suspicions that the lieutenant was passing on information of her every move to those in positions of power, even to the very top.

  So to keep a low profile, she busied herself with the redevelopment of the factory, which proceeded at a rapid pace. “It’s not that much smaller than my father’s silk factory,” Lizzie said one morning. She had now taken on the habit of carrying a clipboard and slotting a pencil behind her antenna. She also wore a belt laden with personally engraved perfume bottles. “Though with the modifications we’ve drawn up, it should be exceedingly more efficient.”

  After the safety checks had been completed, the next phase of construction involved the instalment of the machinery. Working around the clock, factory ants assembled ninety-seven spinning wheels in less than six days. As they did, Samantha trained the first fifteen ants in the art of spinning cotton. They were to become trainers and 1-star floor managers in the ensuing weeks.

  “I’ve been looking at the factory in relation to its position in the anthill,” Samantha said to Lizzie on the floor during one lunch break, “and I think that if we tunnelled another corridor directly to the main sewing factory, we’d cut at least fifteen minutes off transportation time.”

  Lizzie sprayed some vanilla scent into the air and scribbled something down on the clipboard. “Fifteen minutes?” she said, putting the pencil to her mouth and doing some mental arithmetic. “That’ll improve our efficiency by… by… by at least 12.5%. Reet Bee-teet!”

  She told Samantha to wait for a minute and then dashed to her office, returning with a scrolled map of the anthill left behind by the previous sector manager. She unrolled the map and held it up. “Yes …yes, I see it now. Brilliant. Just brilliant,” she said, and lowered the map to look at Samantha. “You know, I always knew you’d come around some day. We belong here, you and me.” She scrolled up the map and sprayed some peppermint perfume. “I’ll let Sector Manager 8473991B know that you’ll be taking charge of the new tunnel.”

  Samantha watched Lizzie head back to her office with relief. The first part of her escape plan had gone relatively smoothly. The second part, getting Mad Jack to dig a secret tunnel from the surface to meet the new transportation tunnel, would be a lot more difficult.

  UP ON THE surface for the next seven evenings, Samantha tried to make conversation with Mad Jack. She figured her first priority was to find out what motivated him to dig so many holes. She brought him honeydew candy to break the ice, which he devoured but still wouldn’t talk. He just kept digging and digging. The guards laughed at her attempts, including Lizzie and her personal security guard. Lieutenant 7725695P, however, didn’t even crack a smile. He just watched from a distance, staring and taking note of everything she did.

  Below the surface in the meantime, sixteen days ahead of schedule, the spinning factory was officially opened. Samantha and Lizzie received a Manager of the Month Award and promotion to the rank of 2-star sub-sector manager. Within four weeks, Procruste Ant Cotton Inc. had become the most profitable and efficiently run company within the anthill. The new transportation tunnel was well underway and everything was running smoothly. Moreover, Lizzie was proving to be more than just a handy spinner of cotton. She was also an extremely capable accounts manager, an absolute whiz with numbers.

  “It must have been all the practice counting my steps,” she said to Samantha at the end of the first operating month. They were lunching in her office, scrutinising the latest efficiency figures. “Numbers just seem to come naturally to me.”

  In the background, the chants of the ants on the factory floor almost drowned out her words:

  We don’t moan,

  And we don’t cry,

  ‘Coz spin-ning cott’n makes us fly!

  One, two, three, four.

  We make thread that’s thick or thin!

  One, two, three, four.

  ‘Coz we’re ants

  Who love to spin!

  At the end of the following month, Lizzie was privy to a rumour (though she wouldn’t say who had let her in on the secret) that they were going to receive a special pardon from the splendiferous Procruste Ant, as part of his upcoming birthday celebrations. Apparently, he was going to issue a decree entitling them to acquire property in sector VB-52, a very exclusive area on the east side of the anthill. They were moving up in the world, as Lizzie had become fond of saying.

  Samantha, herself, only wanted to escape this maddening anthill of job promotions and property accumulation; but by the time the new transportation tunnel was complete, she still had yet to get one word out of Mad Jack Hammer. All he did was dig and dig. Every evening she brought him h
oneydew candy. Every evening he ate it without a word, and every evening she was escorted back to her lodgings more and more frustrated. She felt as if everything in the world was conspiring to keep her from reaching her Bee Dream.

  She was sitting on the edge of one of Mad Jack’s deep pits one evening at rec-break, watching him dig, and not in a particularly good mood. Mad Jack was typically silent. Dirt flew from his spade and landed outside the hole. She had tried everything she possibly could to speak to him and was on the verge of giving up all together. Nothing had changed in the past two months, apart from a lot more holes in the riverbank.

  “You know,” she sighed, “we’re not so dissimilar, you and I. We’re both searching for something and getting nowhere. I’ve been trying to find Beebylon, and you’re trying to find… well, I don’t know what you’re trying to find.”

  All of a sudden, Mad Jack stopped digging and looked up. His brow was smudged with dirt, as were his cheeks and arms and overalls. “Did you say Beebylon?” he asked.

  Samantha was so startled she almost fell into the pit. She stared down at him, then glanced over her wings at the security guards. They were with Lizzie further upstream, watching the chain gang reinforce the riverbank, which was becoming more and more eroded each time she came to the surface. They had got bored of watching her trying to talk to Mad Jack a long time ago. Even the unsmiling Lieutenant 7725695P seemed no longer interested in what she was doing.

  She looked down at Mad Jack again. “You… you can talk,” she said.

  “Of course I can talk,” he said, leaning on his spade. “I’m a termite. Tell me what you know of Beebylon.”

  There was very little time left before rec-break was over. Samantha quickly whispered what little she’d heard, that Beebylon was a magical hive built high upon a cliff where everyone was rich and nobody got sick.

  “And where honey drips from the walls,” Mad Jack added, staring up at the sky with dreamy eyes. Then he sighed, preparing to dig again. “But it’s just a fable. It doesn’t exist.”

  “What if I told you where it is?” she said. Mad Jack looked back up, the spade sticking into the bottom of the pit. “It’s at the lake.”

  “I know of no lake,” Mad Jack said, stretching as high as he could to peer over the rim of the pit. “There’s only this river, and it has no end.”

  At that moment, Samantha heard footsteps approaching from behind. Rec-break was over. Mad Jack hurried back to digging and Samantha was taken to her lodgings, all the while trying to hide her smile from the guards.

  As the days went by, little by little, Samantha began to earn the trust of Mad Jack. Unbeknown to the guards and Lizzie, they discussed many things, the ants, the war effort, Samantha’s capture and detainment, but most of all, Beebylon. After a week, Samantha tentatively mentioned the possibility of escape. Mad Jack wasn’t interested in the slightest. He had an important mission to achieve. He was searching for something.

  “Just what do you hope to find digging all these holes?” Samantha asked in frustration. He had just started on a new pit close to the water’s edge.

  “Honeyroot,” Mad Jack said.

  Honeyroot? The magical root that turned stone into honey, the secret to Infinite Richness? Samantha couldn’t believe it. Queen Beetrix had sent her into the Crazy Lands to bring back that very same thing; without it the High Priestess would continue to usurp her power. Without it Samantha would never see her parents again. She flapped her wings excitedly, despite them being tied together.

  “I know where to find it,” she whispered. The guards and Lizzie were standing within earshot.

  Mad Jack kept on digging, dirt flying over the rim of the pit. “I’ve heard that before,” he said. “I’m not stupid, you know. I’ve been searching for honeyroot since before you were born. What makes you think you know better?”

  “What have you got to lose?” she said, and then walked away, praying he’d taken the bait. She could now concentrate on getting the next phase of the plan into motion.

  THE NEXT DAY on the surface, Samantha completely ignored Mad Jack. She spent the time chatting with Lizzie and the security guards, even though she could see him out the corner of her eyes waving his spade and trying to attract her attention.

  This she allowed to carry on over the next few days, during which she secretly copied the map of the anthill that Lizzie kept in her filing cabinet. The map was high priority, so that Mad Jack knew exactly where to dig, but extremely risky business. Not the least because she had to sneak into Lizzie’s office while she was away from her desk at lunch break or at meetings with other managers or union leaders.

  When she went to the surface in the meantime, she continued to ignore Mad Jack. She could tell he was at his wit’s end. Sometimes he would act as if he had dropped his spade on his foot and jump around pretending to be in pain. Lizzie and the guards would laugh, not knowing that it was just a ruse for getting Samantha’s attention. At other times, he’d amble over to where she was standing with the others and begin to dig a hole right behind her. He would even deliberately toss dirt onto her feet, trying to get her to say something. She never did, but she wasn’t going to make him wait for too much longer.

  While Lizzie was at a meeting with a health and safety inspector the following week, Samantha snuck into her office to make the final amendments to the map she was copying. She went to the filing cabinet and removed the scrolled map. She could hear the ant chants from the factory floor. Somehow, they seemed louder than usual. On the back wall, next to the framed awards for Special Citizen Second Class and Sub-Manager of the Month, a portrait of Procruste Ant glared down upon her. Uneasy at his stare, she removed the copied map she kept folded in her overall pocket and unrolled the scroll on top of the desk. She was just about to begin copying when Lizzie burst into the office.

  “There you are!” Lizzie said, raising her voice. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Samantha stared back, not knowing what to do. “I… I thought you were at a meeting,” she said.

  “Something came up. I cancelled it.” Lizzie shut the door, muffling the outside chants. Her gaze then fell to the desk and the splayed scroll. “What are you doing?” she asked, coming over to get a better look.

  Samantha could see her whole escape plan disappearing down one of Mad Jack’s holes. She was done for. She had to say something – anything – she couldn’t hide what she’d done anymore. “I didn’t want to tell you this just yet,” she began, “but… but I was planning on digging a tunnel to…”

  “To connect the transportation tunnel directly with the central corridor,” Lizzie finished, her claw tracing an imaginary route on the map she thought the tunnel would take. “It’s brilliant, Samantha. It’ll cut thirty minutes off our delivery times. Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  It was a moment before Samantha could think clearly. “You were just so busy,” she said. “I didn’t want to disturb you.” She released the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “Anyway, why did you want to see me?”

  Lizzie continued to stare at the map. “Oh, it’s nothing. I just moulted again this morning, that’s all.” Lizzie glanced up. Her eyes were sad. “I guess I’ll just have to accept the inevitable, won’t I?”

  Despite the mixture of emotions she felt for her friend, Samantha left the office determined to speak to Mad Jack that evening and give him the copy of the map. They had to start digging. The time for waiting was over; she couldn’t afford to risk any more near misses. Anyway, it couldn’t have turned out much better, really. The building of the new connecting tunnel would divert the ants’ attention from any noise Mad Jack might make as he dug into the anthill. It was perfect.

  The Great Mother works in mysterious ways, she thought on her way out of the factory.

  On the surface at rec-break, she saw Mad Jack digging a hole halfway to the water’s edge. Dirt sprayed from his shovel at a rapid pace. While Lizzie strolled with the lieutenants further upstream, Sama
ntha excused herself to stay nearer the anthill. When they had wandered far enough away, she went to speak with Mad Jack.

  When her shadow fell upon him he looked up. “Why’ve you been ignoring me?” he said. “I want to help you escape. I want to go to Beebylon.”

  “Not so loud,” she whispered. She glanced over at Lizzie and the lieutenants. They weren’t looking, so she removed the copied map from her overalls.

  Mad Jack stared at it, confused for a moment, then said, “It’s like a treasure map.”

  Samantha kind of agreed: her treasure was freedom. She told him to use it as a guide to tunnel from the water’s edge into the transportation tunnel. No one would suspect what he’s doing because he always dug. When the tunnel was complete, he’d let her know by signalling with his spade. Then, on the night of the next new moon, she would escape and rendezvous with him at the first bend in the river.

  Mad Jack nodded, and agreed not to talk to her again until they had escaped.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, despite the calmness of her exterior, Samantha’s mind was in a state of minor chaos. She couldn’t concentrate on her work. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. It seemed she couldn’t do anything other than worry about getting caught.

  As a pretence to supervising the work on the new connecting tunnel, she spent a great deal of time in the transportation tunnel alert for any sign of Mad Jack nearing the completion of his diggings; and by the end of the third week, four days before the new moon, she heard a noise above the ceiling, a kind of scraping she hadn’t previously heard.

  Reet Bee-teet! she thought. Her heart skipped a beat and her wings flapped in erratic, short bursts. She peered up at the spot where she had heard the noise. There was a damp patch, from which droplets slowly formed and then dripped onto the floor.

  “I always knew this anthill was built too close to the river,” she heard the lieutenant say from behind.