Invisible Beasts (4 page)

“How would I know about French perfumes, with the gorilla I'm married to? Let me show you this bee . . .” She brushed the computer keys. On the monitor, the bee's foot-long image was reddish and furry. Magnified
again, her fur resembled tangles of raspberry cane. “The branched hairs mean she was a good sticky pollen collector. But what was she doing here, Sophie? Honeybees didn't arrive on this continent till the Pilgrims brought them, and they sure didn't bring
Micrapis
. That's an Asian bee.”

I looked at the bee, then at my sister, temporarily unable to speak. Scientists are animals too, and if you trigger their instincts, you have only yourself to blame. Images flew past on the monitor; Evie was scouting for a scent.

I was thinking of the Keen-Ears. They are a thriving species of invisible humans, and some of their clans live in caves in my woods. The Keen-Ears tolerate me as a harmless snoop; they don't understand why I've posted signs on their perimeter and check it daily, with my dog, for evidence of trespass. They have no idea how I've fought on zoning boards to keep their habitat untouched, and their existence unsuspected. Unworried, they go about their invisible business, tending their red, furry bees that made the dangerous trek with them—preceding
Homo sapiens
by some twelve millennia—out of Asia, across the frigid marshes of Beringia, and down into a land of giant bears and sloths, a lonesome immensity where (as their mournful ballads recount) a beating human heart sounded as loud as thunder and lightning.

The Keen-Ears would not know what I did now. I was making a decision.

Evie lacked one clue to solve her mystery, and it was
this: when they die,
invisible beasts become visible
. (Their bodies go unnoticed, blending into the endless ranks of unknown species.) With that clue, Evie would realize what her Asian bee was, and how it had come to America in the bee-baskets of the primordial Keen-Ears. One word from me, and science could open the vaults of invisible life.

But what would happen to animals impossible to see until they died? The outlook was not good. Humans are not like bees; we did not evolve from predatory wasps into dancing, vegetarian beings whose honey tastes of sisterhood. Humanity's first reaction to the news would be to go out and kill—kill what we couldn't see and didn't understand. Before my mind's eye rolled a vision of Keen-Ear bodies flung in heaps, tied to truck fenders, stuffed and mounted as trophies. I imagined the TV talk shows and the shrieking Web. I imagined the Keen-Ear survivors, sad toys of defense research, dragging on their lives in sunless laboratories. As for their Parfumier Bees . . . as colonies of visible honeybees went on collapsing, some entrepreneur would doubtless try to farm the invisibles, God help them. Or they might go feral again, in a world ridding itself of wild bees. These horrors were the likeliest result of giving Evie the clue she lacked.

Yet I owed my sister. She had never belittled my invisible beasts; no, she had always helped me to understand them. She was a cherished guide on the obscure track I pursued in life. And I owed science a debt, too, for giving
me, since childhood, my inspiration and a standard of truth.

That is what I imagined, and pondered, while Evie knitted her brows and gazed at her computer screen.

“This bee of yours,” I said, steadying my voice, “it's extinct, of course.”

“Well, look at it—it's practically a wasp. It's not far from its wasp progenitors, and it's very, very far from a modern bee. I can't imagine it's still around. But,” Evie said, nailing me with a look, “nature is usually about what we can't imagine.”

3

H
ere (with apologies to Evie) I describe the Keen-Ears, an invisible human subspecies with unusual gifts, whose clans I am privileged to shelter in my woods. The most memorable lesson I've learned from them concerns an ancient problem that our species share, and that they approach by emulating ants—no, it's not about hard work or planning ahead . . .

The Keen-Ears

W
E HUMANS ARE NOT ALONE
. A few subspecies of our kind survive in the dangerous company of
Homo sapiens
by being invisible. The Keen-Ears live in woodlands east of the Rockies and cultivate the edible tree fungus
Laetiporus
, or chicken-of-the-woods, which causes wood rot but is considered a delicacy by both visible and invisible humans. The Keen-Ears are master fungus breeders; they create many invisible strains of
Laetiporus
, puzzling some foresters, who can see that a log is rotting, all right, but cannot see why. Visible
Laetiporus
looks like an orange brain. In the invisible varieties, the Keen-Ears have bred a palette of colors—teal, mauve, scarlet, ice pink, purple—in concentric, paisley, striped, and marbled designs. Wisely, the Keen-Ears have tampered with visible
Laetiporus
to keep it from breeding with its glamorous invisible cousins. They don't want any episodes of
Homo sapiens
stumbling onto a psychedelic fungus protruding from a tree trunk, finding out why, then killing or enslaving all the Keen-Ears. With some remorse—because they're serious about
bioethics and believe in sharing the benefits of science—the Keen-Ears think they are justified in keeping their fungus farming secrets from us. They think we mostly prefer mushrooms, anyway.

The Keen-Ears are short, slight, furred, and have large ears that make them look like Hermes in his winged helmet. Their fur is gray and weather-resistant, so they go naked, with a double pelt in winter. Their ears are so keen that they can hear blood coursing through the body's vessels. Not even the Great Horned Owl can float by them unnoticed; they hear its pulse beating over the treetops as it readies the mouse-sized cage of its claws. This special gift has countless ramifications, most of them enviable.

Among the Keen-Ears, you never see two people trying to move out of each other's way, apologizing as they both step right or left at the same time. The Keen-Ears can detect the sound of muscles tensing for a movement—like dogs, they can tell when you're about to get up, or leave the room. At mealtimes, eerily, they share a salt dip without a word or glance from the person offering or accepting. What's more, each person has a blood-signature which sounds as unique to them as a voice to us. A Keen-Ear lying with eyes closed under a feather blanket knows exactly which child is creeping barefoot to the fried fungus jar. They also hear the turbulence that anger causes, and know the combinations of blood-sound and body language for a wide range of feelings. Living as they do in small clans, their minds are nearly as
naked as their bodies. (This makes fistfights challenging, though feasible.) They sometimes talk on algae-powered telephones, but such bloodless communication is called “corpse talk” and viewed as an unseemly necessity.

They have epic songs about the dangers awaiting small, isolated genetic groups like their own clans. The verses they intone, while doing chores in their caves, tell of beasts who selected themselves into an evolutionary cul-de-sac, or outgrew their niches. The Keen-Ears don't particularly enjoy these mournful lays, but insist that their daily performance is vital to “good health.” They call us “Flu-huggers,” and say that we have poor bodily health because we don't sing the tales of the species gone from our habitats. Curiously, the Keen-Ears' songs really do help them prevent disease. The ancient melodies were composed to harmonize with the bloodstream—with the boom of stretched atria or the arpeggios of squeezed capillaries—and the Keen-Ears “play” their blood pressure like an instrument, through biofeedback, while singing. This is very good for their hearts. They also diagnose vascular illness with astonishing precision. From eavesdropping on their gossip, for instance, I learned about my illness long before a doctor noticed anything—“that old snoop with arterial plaque,” they called me. (Admittedly, I see the Keen-Ears more often than doctors.)

The sheer physical harmony of the Keen-Ears' lives seems to limit antagonism. When five of them sit on a twisted oak-root to peruse a map of fungus stands, they
sink onto it as one, gracefully. Nobody has to scoot over or scrunch in. It's not surprising that they dance like angels and make love with the ease of the elements. But for all that, the Keen-Ears are human, and for them as for us, love is complication.

Versed in fungus genetics and animal genealogies, the Keen-Ears have long ago mastered the art of breeding themselves; but unlike us, who try such things under the spur of creepy racism, the Keen-Ears enjoy a personal and sexual freedom we can scarcely imagine, coupled with social stability. Their folkways, though unsuitable for our own rambunctious, high-strung species, are yet worthwhile to contemplate. They live in clans separated by gender. Between men's and women's caves there is plenty of traffic, and all relationships are possible—business, cultural collaborations of all kinds, professional associations, friendships, love affairs, even hauntingly coordinated orgies. But when it comes to making babies, each women's clan hosts one male guest, who is the exclusive father of any infants born during his stay. After about three years, he rejoins his old clan and the women choose a new man. Genealogies are closely tracked. To prevent inbreeding, a clan father is never invited twice, and incestuous ties are taboo. Sons go to live with their father's clan in late childhood, but both sons and daughters remain in close touch with their biological parents and siblings. Careful family planning, and tight family and clan ties, mean that no one in the
Keen-Ear caves is born unwanted, or dies untended, or lives in poverty—and everybody babysits. How many times I've lurked outside a warmly lit Keen-Ear cave, wistfully eavesdropping on conversations in which these precious safeguards are taken for granted.

The marriage rite of the Keen-Ears is the most exotic part of their family arrangements. To choose clan fathers, they have adapted a process of decision-making found among ants and bees.

“It's time you learned about the ants and the bees,” Keen-Ear parents tell their children, clearing their throats. Particularly ants. The lesson sends little Keen-Ear girls scurrying to find anthills, spending hours in rapturous observation, as our own small daughters play at becoming brides. The naughtiest Keen-Ear girls even kick apart anthills for the secret thrill of watching the great event happen. Called “quorum sensing,” the process helps ants and bees choose new nesting sites without having to rely on an authority—a judge, boss, or chief—to make the final decision. It begins with scouts; in the case of ants, each scout goes off separately to find a new possible nest site, then scurries back to the colony, delivers a report, and recruits other ants to visit the potential site. Timing is the key to the final decision: ants reporting an inferior site take a little longer, as if mastering some embarrassment, and the delay ultimately counts, as we will see. Though trickles of hurried ants running in and out of rocky crevices may not sound romantic, nothing
could be more breathlessly fascinating than the marriage rite of the Keen-Ears, those wise apes of the ants!

I
N SPRING, WHEN THE MOON
shining through translucent leaves suspends the black trees in a jelly of light, and flowering crabapples perfume the night, the Keen-Ear women dust their bodies with colored powders, hang strings of oak-pollen tassels from their ears to their glimmering shoulders, and fasten filigree capes, made of leaf-skeletons, from their necks to their ankles. In this ceremonial dress, all the women—from old, bent clan mothers clinging to a youngster's elbow, to young would-be mothers standing very straight with excitement—visit the candidates for clan fatherhood, who have spent months preparing for the events of this evening, called Niche Night.