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A telegram had warned Hive-Maker of a new disease among the British black bees.
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Frames are the wooden constructs inserted into the artificial wooden hive, that hold the wall to wall natural cells which the bees live within and between. Here, a single frame has been pulled out of the hive; it has the shape of a single still cut out of a long sequence of similar stills, usually one next to another inside a movie. If the hive is a movie, it has a different shape than the spiraling celluloid strip ordinarily unwound by projectors. Imagine a square tall movie made of stacked frames, a skyscraper of frames, something like a hive, but actually a human building. Each floor of this building-which-is-a-movie is a frame, and each frame is made of cells, identical but for the fact that they are in different places on the flat surface of their skyscraping floor. Tear open the building and stare at a floor cell. in the confusion of your eye, the single empty cell in the field of cells seems to move and fill the entire flat surface, and in the vertigo of your thought, you fall into a volume of unthinking space. What a realistic space, no separation between the moments of its clocking time, filled with no grain because each cell on each frame holds an entire movie in itself, and yet it is only one cell on one floor of a great movie-building in a city made of such buildings, with pipes and subways and other forms of interconnection, which head out towards edges which are never hit, for there is always another town, then a village, then a town, then a city, and at worst you'll find a spaceport, here on the edge of this great new Galaxy recently colonized by people like you, who built this city and its buildings and the movies inside the buildings, and who never run out of time to do the things which prevent anything anywhere from ever becoming empty.
Meanwhile, Hive-Maker, always looking for the profitable in the ordinary, watches the surface of the flat rational comb set in this frame just pulled out of the hive, looking as always for some sort of sign. a talking bee (hey you), a flash of unusual color, synchronized dancing spelling the name of some popular product, anything new and useful. But the honey storage is not optically coherent today, and generally doesn't reveal its secrets easily to the naked eye in this season. A form of nasal decryption is required to figure out just what is happening today to these bees in these hives. Hive-Maker is tired, and cannot make the effort.
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04:04
