Rootless

by Chris Howard

  I shuffled back inside the laboratory and sat watching the lights and screens as they bubbled and flashed. It was almost like I was dreaming. Everything inside me was numb. I fell down in a chair and tried to be empty. But I kept seeing my old man’s face. I kept looping over our life together, trying to figure out how he’d been able to walk away from me.

  I tried to remember every little thing, searching for clues. But my father seemed a whole different person than the bag of memories I’d been carting around. He was like someone I’d never even known. A stranger.

  I started turning over the steps it had taken to get to this place. I started to think about Alpha. And Crow. I worked myself up in a right state. And by the time the Creator came in, brushing snow off her shoulders, I felt I’d lost more than I ever knew I had.

  “Why’d he do it?” I said, watching the woman shrug off her coat. I’d surprised her, but she tried to look relaxed about me sitting there. “Why’d he come back here? For you?”

  The woman sank into a chair across from me and she made that same sad smile that Hina had used and Zee had perfected.

  “He’d have never come for me,” she said. “He came because of the experiments. Told me he’d waited till he’d raised you. He said you were free.”

  “What experiments?” I pictured Alpha, shorn and shriveled and covered in plastic. And I pictured Crow, his chopped-off body being carried away. “Where are the others?” I said, panic welling up inside me. “The others from the boat?”

  “Don’t worry,” the woman said. “They’re sleeping.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “They’re special, Banyan. And they’re safe.”

  “Not like the ones you burned in Vega.” I saw Sal’s face like a ghost in my mind, remembered how the kid hadn’t even screamed when he sizzled and smoked.

  “Vega’s nothing to do with me,” the woman said. “That’s the Executive Chief and the number crunchers. The bottom line. It’s not something anyone enjoys. It’s just something we have to tolerate.”

  I glared at her, trying to bend my mind around what was happening. This couldn’t be my mother. I wouldn’t let it be. My brain was getting spun up and caught on itself, but I needed answers and the need cut through like a knife.

  “Tolerate for what?”

  “Come closer,” she said. “Please. I’ll show you.”

  I stood behind her as she flicked her fingers at a control pad, bringing an empty black screen to life. Our faces were reflected in the monitor and I could see the woman had turned and was staring up at me, but then the screen turned purple and our faces disappeared. I watched as tiny white lines floated across the screen and met in the middle, small blocks getting bolted together, growing taller. Stitched like sections of scaffold.

  “We’re creating life,” the woman said, her voice little more than a whisper. “And your father was very good at it.”

  “What is it?” My eyes were glued to the staircases growing in spiraled patterns on the screen.

  “It’s DNA. Nucleotide sequences. The building blocks behind every living thing.”

  “Science.”

  “It’s nature. Your father was very bright, Banyan. He had a gift. He saw how things could fit together, the pieces that were missing.” She shifted in her seat so she was closer to me, almost touching. Her whole body so near I could smell her. Sour and soapy. Cold and damp with snow. “For almost five years, I taught him, showed him my work. I trained him in DNA geometry, helical modeling. But eventually he could see through complexities that had blinded me. He never built the monument GenTech hired him for. He worked in the lab. Making trees. With me.”

  “Don’t look like much of a tree,” I said, and I felt her smile so hard beside me that her skinny shoulders bounced.

  “Break something into small enough pieces,” she said. “And you get a code.”

  “Like a map?”

  “Exactly. A map you can change. Rebuild. We’re building trees, Banyan. Replicating the trees we found on this island, altering them to bring them back to the mainland.” I felt her hand on my arm. “We’ve been trying for decades. To modify the trees into something the locusts can’t consume.”

  “Like the corn.”

  “But what worked for the corn wouldn’t work for the trees. We’ve had to change their cellular structure into something more malleable. We’ve had to hybridize the tree DNA with that of another, more abundant species.”

  I stepped back from the woman. Turned from the screen. I pictured the old Rasta and that chunk of wood I’d knifed out of him. I pictured Alpha’s skin, all plugged up with bark.

  “Humans,” I said, staggering backward. “You’re using humans.”

  It made me sick the way she frowned, the lines on her face all scrunched up like there was poison on her tongue. I lost feeling and swayed, caught myself on the back of a chair. This was Project Zion. GenTech was taking folk and twisting them and god knows how many and this woman right here was at the heart of it all.

  “Only the hybrid cells can be modified,” she said. “And there’s nothing else to use. The corn’s too synthetic. We’d have used animals, but there’s nothing left. Nothing but people.”

  “What do you do to them?” I whispered, as if the words had snuck out.

  “We call it fusion.”

  “You kill them?”

  “I don’t kill anyone. It’s a sacrifice, that’s all.”

  “A sacrifice? For what?”

  “So we can regrow the world, clean the air and the water. Wood and paper. Shelter. And fruit trees, Banyan. Real fruit trees.”

  “Right,” I said, yelling now. “Regrow the world and stamp GenTech on every damn part of it.”

  She shot me a look like I’d punched her.

  “And my dad helped do this?”

  “He left when we realized what had to be done.”

  “Didn’t want blood on his hands, that it?”

  “He was afraid.”

  “Sure he was. Shit. Maybe he was afraid of you.”

  She stood and struck me, the back of her bony hand stinging my cheek. But somehow it was like I’d beaten her at something. Her eyes filled up and the breath shuddered out of her. And then she just turned her face to the machines.

  “You still want to see him?” she said, like it was all she had left she could offer.

  But I told myself it wasn’t just Pop I’d come looking for. Hell, I reckoned I’d come looking for a thing that don’t go leaving. And some damn thing that you can’t leave behind.

  “You can keep him,” I said. “All I want to see is the trees.”

  Zee wrapped me up in GenTech purple and tugged my head inside a bulky hood. I couldn’t say anything to her. I just let her dress me, my thoughts spinning slow like wheels getting stuck.

  “Come on,” she whispered into the hood as she cinched up my jacket. “You’ll feel better when you see them.”

  My head had drooped and I couldn’t see Zee’s face, but I figured she was smiling. And I tried to let the thought of that smile warm me, because all I felt now was lost and alone.

  Don’t go believing in fairy tales, Pop had told me. Don’t go kidding yourself. No trees, he used to say. Nothing left.

  But Pop had been lying to me. All of my life.

  Zee led me down corridors and up steps, and finally we pushed outside, the freezing air trickling inside my coat.

  I stared around at the patches of ice and the gray sky and the concrete buildings. Then Zee took my hand and guided me through the snow.

  “She might’ve been a copy,” I said as we began to scale one of the powdery slopes, “but I liked your momma a whole lot more than the real thing.”

  “Hina was real.”

  “Real enough, I guess.”

  “She was supposed to be a sign,” Zee said. “I don’t think I was even supposed to happen.”

  “A sign? A sign of what?”

  “The Creator said that once they could produce people the same way the
trees here reproduce themselves, she knew they’d be able to splice the two species together. So they sent Hina south. To find our father. To show him they’d done it.”

  “She went south, all right. Got herself to the South Wall.”

  “Our father had joined up with rebels. People that used to fight against GenTech.”

  “Yeah. I seen what was left of them,” I said, and I remembered what Jawbone had told me about the pirates. I remembered their flag. The Army of the Fallen Sun.

  “Hina was the breakthrough,” Zee went on, sounding sort of proud about it. “Your mom thought our dad might come back and help, when he’d seen what was possible. When he’d seen they could make a perfect human copy. Your mom thought he might change his mind.”

  “You need to stop calling her that.”

  “The Creator, then. The Creator thought he’d come back.”

  “To do what? Make fake people?”

  “Copying people was the first step. But only certain people’s cells can be fused with the trees. The tattoo.” Zee ran her hand across her belly. “It was coded with these numbers. Protein numbers. They’d figured out which combinations worked with the tree cells. So now they knew they had to find the people with the right DNA.”

  So the numbers weren’t coordinates at all. Just more science. The science that determined whether you lived or died in that factory. The science that had killed Sal.

  “Same kind of shit they pulled on the corn,” I said. “Same shit. Just people this time.”

  “They’re trying to fix things.”

  “Well, I reckon they should give it a damn rest.”

  “They grew my mom here,” said Zee, her voice quiet.

  “They just used her.”

  “I know.”

  “And this Creator woman, she’s just using you, too.”

  “I don’t care.” Zee pointed at her chest as she breathed the cold clean air. She tugged at her fuzzy GenTech coat. “I’ve been used my whole life, I’ll take this any day.”

  “Take what?”

  “Being on the side that’s winning.”

  “So you found Zion and you got what you wanted.”

  “I can breathe, can’t I? And I don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

  We were halfway up the slope and I was worn out from it. I stopped and stared back down at the compound. Just three buildings covered in snow — the one we’d emerged out of, a much larger bunker, and between the two of them was a small steel dome. There was not a single window on any one of the buildings. Agents were stationed at every door.

  And according to Zee, my old man had once stolen me away from this place. So this was where I’d been born, then. This was where I was from.

  I watched the smoking bio vat on the ridge across from me, pumping out juice like a giant metal heart. And here and there I could see bits of old junk poking out of the frozen landscape.

  “Do you think he loved her?” Zee said.

  “Who?”

  “Hina.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Least she weren’t running around killing folk.”

  “But he still left her.”

  “He was good at ditching people. It’s a skill, maybe.”

  “You want so bad to hate him. So should I hate him more? Hina always told me my real dad had no idea I existed. He must have left her before he even knew I was gonna be born.”

  I thought about the statue down in Old Orleans. And I wondered if it had really been built for Hina. Or had what Pop loved in the replicant been something he’d loved a whole lot longer?

  And I must have been there, I realized. Back then. In Old Orleans. If everything Zee had said was true. I’d have been tiny. Just barely been born, perhaps. But I’d have been there. On my old man’s back, buried in a blanket. Holding on as he built the statue that years later I came to finish. The statue he’d left with the face still missing.

  “She was like a reflection,” I said. “Your momma.”

  “I think in the end she reminded him of what he’d done. The experiments. This.” She pointed down at the compound. “You were the only thing he didn’t tie to this place. And when he gave you up, it was only so he could try and stop it all.”

  I pulled off my hood so I could stare at her, but Zee was all bundled and hidden away.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The agents talk about it. Last winter. Everyone thought he’d come back to help finish the project. But he staged an uprising. Freed people, got them back to the mainland. People like that crazy old Rasta we found.”

  I thought about what the Creator had said. About Pop raising me and me being free.

  Is that why he’d never told me?

  Had he just waited till I was old enough so I could keep on with the building? And then he’d gone off to risk everything, to try to put all this right?

  “Uprising,” I whispered.

  “Yeah. Until he got caught.”

  I pictured that photograph of Pop chained to the tree. And then I remembered the bootlegger we’d buried — the woman beat to death for giving out corn. She’d been our last client. Our last job together. Before Pop hightailed us on the road to Vega.

  My heart got fast and the world got slow.

  “And now they’ve got him locked up,” I said.

  “Right.”

  I remembered the old Rasta, a lifetime ago, shaking his staff at the sunrise.

  “And they’re gonna kill him,” I said, my voice getting louder. “In the spring?”

  “Sooner than that. Used to be that’s when they’d do the experiments. But they’ve got it all figured out now. They’re ready to bring a forest back to the mainland.”

  “They’re gonna use ’em.” I thought of Alpha. Crow. “The people from the boat?”

  “Them and the rest they’ve gathered, the ones with the right DNA.”

  “But that woman said they’re sleeping. Safe.”

  “They are. Until fusion kicks in.” Zee pointed down at the main bunker. And somewhere down there, locked up, was my old man. Still bound in chains, perhaps. Still holding on. And Alpha was trapped down there, too. Was she sleeping? Was she dreaming her tree builder had drifted away?

  “When does it start?” I said.

  “Two more days.”

  I glanced up the slope, the way we were heading.

  “And what do they call this place?”

  “Promise Island.”

  I thought about that old Rasta again, his belly bubbled up with bark. I tried to remember the things he’d told me. And I thought about Pop as I slumped down hard on the snow.

  Had he been protecting me?

  He’d gone to fix something he had long kept secret, something he figured me too weak to know. But I’d made it here, anyway. Made it without him.

  “Come on,” Zee said, taking my hand and squeezing my fingers through our thick gloves. “We’re almost there.”

  Top of the hill and I could see all the way down the other side. All the way down to the tops of the trees.

  I stood there, staring down at the leafless branches that reached up at me. And I thought at once how pale and flimsy the trees appeared. Nothing I’d ever built resembled their fragility.

  My legs made fast work scrambling downhill, and the movement felt like I was jump-starting myself. It began snowing again as I reached the bottom of the crunchy slope, and I stood for a moment, just ten feet from the spindled branches, watching as they danced in the wind and the white flakes fell.

  I took a step forward. A few more steps. Then I was close enough to touch the thin trunks. The papery bark. I pulled off my gloves and shoved my sleeves to my elbows. Then I reached my hands to the trees and ran my fingers slow and cold upon them.

  The bark felt powdery, but beneath it was slippery and smooth. Greenish white in color, with black knots like eyeballs. I pushed at a tree and it pushed right back.

  I got closer, yanked off my hood, and stuck my face against the wood, breathing its smell and tasting i
t with my tongue, snow melting on my lips.

  I stepped from one tree to another, moving my hands so as to never let them go.

  I dug at the snow with my boot heel and studied where the trees plunged into the earth. I found leaves beneath the ice, some gold, some yellow, most of them black. They were soggy and mashed together, but I squeezed the leaves in my fingers and separated them out to dry. I bit into one and its veins were chewy. And then I just sank to my knees and I broke down and cried.

  Zee sat on the edge of the forest, watching me, and when I got done crying, she shuffled through the slush and sticks and knelt beside me.

  “You should keep your hood up,” she said. “Or you’ll freeze over.”

  My face was all snotty and wet and I wiped it with snow. “Don’t look like nothing I ever pictured,” I said.

  “Me, neither.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “A week or so.”

  “You used to it yet?”

  “A little.”

  “I don’t want to ever get used to it,” I said. “Not ever.”

  “Imagine the spring, though. The leaves coming green. The seasons.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The seasons. My specialty.

  I stared into the forest, and there, in the middle of the stand, was an opening. A clearing. I stood and stumbled toward it.

  “This is where they take them from,” Zee said, coming up behind me. “In here was the one they really want.”

  “What is it?”

  “Apples. An apple tree. It was right here.”

  I thrashed around in the opening, but the only trees I could see were the thin limbs, the dirty white bark like old pearl in moonlight.

  “It’s gone,” Zee said. “They got it all worked up. Ready for the fusion.”

  “You seen one? An apple?”

  “We’re too far north. The Creator says the growing season’s too short. They tried bringing a tree back to the mainland. Years ago. Grew it up in a glass building. But a swarm left their nest in the cornfields and migrated over. They covered the glass and blocked out the sun, made a hole and squeezed inside.” Zee shuddered. “But the locusts won’t eat these new trees they’re making. They can’t even burrow inside them like they do in the corn.”