WICASTA LOVELACE

The Morning After

    “You killed them all.”

    “Well... yeah. Sort of.”

    “Sort of?” she boggled. “There is no ‘sort of’. You do not ‘sort of’ kill people. They are alive or they are dead. End of discussion.”

    He sighed. “Okay. Things got out of hand.”

    “Out of hand? Out of hand?! Do you have any idea...”

    Agnon held up his hand. To his surprise, Mesu stopped talking. The silence between them was sudden. Uncomfortable. Final. They both let it set there. Breathe. It wasn’t in the room with them. They were in the room with it. It filled the room, and, really, it said all that needed to be said. Mistakes had been made. Costly ones.

    “Look,” Agnon began. Stopped. There was nothing there. No excuses. No explanations. He’d done what he had done. What had to be done. No discussions. “In the end,” Agnon began again, “what will result from all this is a realignment of conflicting ideology. Without central leadership to serve as a focal point, this systemic rage will diffuse, if not dissipate. With no one thwacking the hornets’ nest the drones will settle down.”

    Mesu nodded. Sighed. Shrugged. “I understand. Why. Strategically. But I do want to a point out a flaw in your metaphor. I think it is salient, given the context and the who.” She looked at him, but beyond him, and through him, as her mind traced threads of causality and unintended consequences. There were always contingencies. “In a hornets’ nest,” she told him, “drones are the males. Did you know that? Drones exist for one reason; to mate with the Queen. They do not perform hive duties. Foraging. Maintenance. None of it. They mate. They die.” She drifted to the window, massaging her temples. “The hornets who protect the nest, those with stingers, those which will hurt you and have afforded hornets in general a fearful reputation for being aggressive and, shall we say, having a certain level of commitment,” she turned back to Agnon and smiled, with just a hint of anger welling up in her chest, “those are the females. They do not settle down. They remember. They have long collective memories.”

    “Mesu,” Agnon said softly, “with all due respect, and I do deeply respect your insight and intellect,” he paused, the proverbial ice cracking beneath him, “there are subtleties to a male dominated society that may not see. Your species has no males. You’re all female. Reasonable. Logical. Testosterone free.” He smiled. She did not. ”Beyond a certain point, you can’t reason with males. Beyond a certain point, you put them down, or they put you down. I made the call to put these men down because there was no reasoning with them. The only thing we could expect from here on out was escalation.”

    Mesu watched him. For a long time. Part of it was calculated. She watched him until he fidgeted. She had a point to make. He needed to listen. To understand. “What you did will be effective against your kind,“ she told him. “Against the men, anyway.” She launched herself from the window, began pacing the room. There were so many threads. So much would go wrong from here. “The men, the drones, may well ‘settle down’, but their allies, those among my people and the Eduvasi, those with the stingers...” she smiled sadly at him, “now they will be coming.” She sighed. “You have no idea what you’ve set into motion.”