The Family Tree

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “What brings you down here?” Lynn gestured at the littered desks, the messy, memo-hung walls.

  “That guy who was stabbed in the parking lot outside the medical school? Manconi’s case. Can you pull that file?”

  Lynn went tap-tapping at her keyboard, searching for the name, the case number. “June twelfth. Dr. Martin Chamberlain. He was a geneticist.”

  “Refresh my memory. What was the weapon?”

  Lynn tapped at her keyboard once more. “Wide-bladed, double-edged something.”

  “How did I know you were going to say that? What was he working on?”

  “All it says here is he was researching into the cause of genetic diseases.”

  “I wonder if there might be more. Do you remember any other homicide or assault cases lately where somebody was trying to fool Mother Nature?”

  Lynn sat back, opened her eyes very wide. “Fool Mother Nature? How?”

  “Any old how. Like somebody who was killing animals or plants, or maybe changing animals or plants?”

  Lynn nodded. “Your mentioning plants reminds me of one about two months ago. Back in May. Woman worked for one of the big lumber companies. I guess you could say she was fooling with Mother Nature. She was working on trees, ways to make them resistant to disease and pollution. That one’s sort of mysterious. She was stabbed, too, but nobody can figure why.”

  “Two months ago? You want to look up the weapon?”

  “Right.” She tapped intently, then looked up, eyes wide.

  “Wide blade, double edge, right?” said Dora. “And you can add another one.”

  “When?”

  “They found him this morning. He was working with animals, not trees, but it was the same MO.”

  They sat, staring at each other. “Some kind of serial killer?” Dora asked. “Some environmental nut?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  She explained about Winston and the animal research. “Can you give me the case number and name on the case in May?”

  Lynn tapped and muttered, coming up with the requisite name. “Dr. Jennifer Williams, Ph.D. and all that. What are you going to do with it?”

  Dora shrugged. “Mention to the medical examiners that we’ve got three stabbings, each a month apart, each involving scientists, possibly the same weapon. See if maybe we can connect them up.”

  “It sounds crazy, but I’ll let you know if any others pop to the top.”

  Dora left it at that. Crazy or not, it would come down to asking questions and looking at answers, over and over. It was always interesting. Frustrating sometimes, but always interesting. Always something intriguing for the next day.

  She yawned. Too many late nights lately, getting herself moved in. It would be good to go home, have a bath, maybe sit out in her clay patch for a while. Maybe pull a few dandelions.

  When she got home, the first thing she saw was the weed, now all the way up beside her door, arching over it in a little hood, like a tiny porch roof.

  “Hello, weed,” she said.

  All the leaflets turned in her direction. Among them she could see the tiny spheres of seed heads, like bubbles of silken floss. A few strands came loose as she watched, floating away, almost invisible.

  She swallowed deeply and went in. The light was blinking on her answering machine, a message from Polly.

  “Hey, Dora, welcome to your new home. I got to thinking about your weed, you know. Or, Jared’s weed, I guess. The way it kind of turned toward people. Anyhow, I’ve been reading up, and I found a couple of examples of what they call irritomotility in plants. Mimosa is one, and there’s a sensitive briar, genus Shrankia, of the Leguminosae family. Anyhow, they grow a lot like the weed, and they move when they’re touched. I’m wondering if the weed is related to something like that, only it moves in response to sound, maybe, or odors. What do you think? Call me when you’ve got a minute.”

  Dora went down the stairs and opened the door softly. When she stepped out onto the stoop, the leaflets turned toward her. As long as she stood there, they remained turned in her direction. So, it wasn’t motion. Or sound. Odor? Maybe. Or body heat. Or maybe it could see her.

  Silly! She shook her head and went back inside to call Polly.

  6

  Izakar, Prince of Palmia

  “When one tallies the talents needed in a progressive nation, one would be at a loss to fulfill them without the varied skills shown by the ponjic tribes. Whether it is in architecture or the manufacture of furnishings, whether in the production of woven goods or the casting of metals, the ponjic peoples are supreme. It is said that a ponji needs see a process only once to be able to improve upon it! They are known as a talkative people—perhaps because they have so much to talk about!—but their loquacity is surpassed by their charm. Every military establishment has its ponjic aide de camp; every embassy its ponjic attaché, without whose good offices nothing would be done as well or as gladly, and who has not delighted in the marvelous dramas staged by this talented people….”

  THE PEOPLES OF EARTH

  HIS EXCELLENCY, EMPEROR FAROS VII

  Across the Stony Mountains from Tavor was the land of Palmia, and in Palmia lived Izakar Poffit, Izakar the Indifferent, smart-ass Izakar, entering upon difficulty and danger as he approached adulthood; Schizy Izzy, Prince of Palmia, who try as he would could not claim ignorance of the prophecy that held his life in thrall.

  His maternal grandfather had first told him of the prophecy when he was a mere child, barely able to babble the Marconite Obfuscations. Aunt Aggie and Cousin Clair-belle had mentioned the prophecy in passing and with utmost sarcasm at least once or twice a week from the time he was a toddler (“Oh, isn’t he the big male person, all ready to fulfill his prophecy!”). That is, they had done so until just recently when it occurred to someone that the prophecy, instead of being an amusing anecdote, was in fact a sentence of death, not only for Izzy but for the rest of them as well.

  At that point everyone stopped mentioning it altogether, as though silence on the subject would make it go away. Izakar’s time and place was, in this respect, no different from other times and places where imminent danger is met by putting one’s head beneath the blanket.

  As for Prince Izakar himself, the prophecy had been so frequently and inconsequentially mentioned that he had become indifferent to the subject long before he’d come to terms with it. He tended to put it in the same category as other adult concerns one would prefer not to consider: the inevitability of death, the necessity of toil, the malevolence of Fate, and sex between one’s parents. Besides, he was more interested in other things.

  Magic, for instance. Magic was intriguing, some of it was great fun, useful for getting even with cousins and aunts, except when one was caught at it and had one’s mouth washed out with soap for Malicious Utterance. Though he was taught only beneficent, defensive, or protective magics, he had to learn about the others. It was rather like being taught to train and ride horses and donkeys, but learning about umminhi on the side. The former were useful, the latter could be deadly dangerous, but if a person was to have a chance at survival, he had to know about danger. As Uncle Goffio often said, ignorance may be bliss, but it’s damned poor life insurance.

  In addition to magic, Izzy liked green things rather a lot. This interest was both inculcated and sustained by his Aunt Aggie, who, as a closet Korèsan, considered the biological world the only thing worth people’s adoration. Izzy also enjoyed cooking. There was something very satisfying about making a good sauce as well as eating it. He liked girls, also, in an associative sense. He found them less wearing than the males about the place, all of whom seemed dedicated to the competitive use of arms and the equally competitive consumption of food, drink and females. Belching, puking, or undergoing painful but ineffectual treatment for battle wounds or sexual diseases did not seem fun to Izzy, though Cousin Tonio was always doing one or the other and didn’t seem to mind.

  Tonio was a noted ladies’ man, and he had pro
mised to initiate Izzy into the gentle game of the boudoir epée. Frolic fencing, as Tonio called it, though he also used rather blunter words for it. Aunt told him he was not to involve Izzy until Izzy was Old Enough. Izzy doubted he was Old Enough yet, as he was lightly built and slightly less than seventeen hands tall. His hair was rather red, and longer than average, and he brushed it back from his forehead into a kind of queue, gathered up at the neck. His eyes were brown. Unlike most males of his class, he was somewhat abstemious and abhorred violence, believing, accurately, that anyone his size with any sense at all should not only abhor violence but go to great lengths to avoid it.

  For relaxation Izzy played the larbel, a wooden instrument with a rounded sound box and six strings, which could be either bowed or plucked. In talented hands it was said to soothe the spirits of the damned. Izzy doubted this, for though he was very talented, he had not noted any soothed spirits floating around in his general vicinity.

  Formally, the people of Palmia, Izzy’s people, were Bubblians, worshippers of Great Ghoti, who eight hundred years ago had blown the bubble-world just as it was now, complete with apparently ancient ruins and trees in order to give people the illusion of time. Ghoti blows such bubbles, so the priests said, for his own amusement. Ghoti intends, so the priests declared, that this particular bubble be very, very small—obviating the need for exploration—with only a few simple things in it—obviating the need for science—all of which any child could understand—obviating the need for study. Things which seemed more complex were only illusions. Things which could not be understood at first glance were better ignored.

  The bubble was to last a total of one thousand years, at the end of which time the Arch-child, Ghoti’s son Bandercran, would pierce the bubble with the Conceptual Needle and everything would go pop. Everything, so the Ghotian bishops said, except for those disobedient persons who had insisted upon exploring, experimenting, and studying, whom Ghoti would select to occupy an adjacent bubble called hell.

  Izzy, orphaned early, had learned all this from various relatives and servitors. He had been about eleven when he had asked the castle wizard—that magician/cum shaman/cum sorcerer assigned to keep the palace and its residents free of hexes, spites, and spooklice—about the death of Izzy’s father. Izzy knew he had been beheaded, but he had never been told why.

  The wizard, looking cautiously over his shoulder to be sure they were alone, had whispered that the former king came to grief through coveting a former time.

  To Izzy, who woke up disputatious a dozen days out of a fortnight, longing for a former time did not seem to be a capital crime. Unwisely, he said as much.

  “Hush,” hissed the wizard, putting his fingers over Izzy’s lips. “The Ghotian council of bishops said it was not a former time in this bubble your father longed for, but some other bubble altogether.”

  “Ah,” said Izzy, astounded into indiscretion. “So you know about other bubbles.”

  “No, no,” cried the wizard in a perfect frenzy of negation. “There are no other bubbles. Not for us! Your father longed for fiction, for fantasy, for a thing he called technology. He was found guilty of electrifying.”

  This crime, whispered the wizard, had something to do with machines. To be safe from heresy, the wizard gasped, one must accept that there are not and never have been any other bubbles for people. Izzy fumed, but despite knowing very well that there were jillions of other bubbles, he did not contradict! He had, after all, taken an oath not to reveal that knowledge.

  His enlightenment on such subjects as space and time had begun on a memorable day during his sixth year when he had been astonished to see a group of dusty persons emerging from a seemingly solid wall in the corridor where he was, at the time, playing with his pee-pee. These persons first suggested that Izzy put his pee-pee away, then told him they had come to divulge the king’s secret, a secret which the sudden execution of Izzy’s father had prevented his passing on to any of his sons. These persons had seized Izzy up forthwith and taken him below, to a marvelous place that no one in the palace had any knowledge of whatsoever: the Great Library.

  Izzy never grew really accustomed to the library. Even after years of frequenting the place, he still found it astonishing. There were shelves everywhere, most of them behind dusty glass doors that protected the books within from the fly and the moth and the worm. There were desks at which one might spell out, letter by letter, requests for information. There were ancient machines which still blinked to life and spoke in various of the speak-systems: from the early cycles Latyn and Frinch and Swajili and Inglitch—which was still spoken as a kind of trade language—from later cycles Armbun and Flok, and from the current time, Isfoinian and Finialese and Tavorian and Estafaner, the highly aspirated language of the sea peoples and the debased Uk-luk dialects of the Onchikian tribes who lived in the shore counties along the Crawling Sea. Though many of these languages were archaic, or even dead, one could make them out. With difficulty, with diligence, with dictionaries. With the help of the Linguists and the Librarians, people who traced their origins back to the very first cycle, almost back into the prelinguistic ooze.

  Since that first day, Izzy had spent much of his time in the ancient and mysterious lairs below, being instructed in the many things Bubblians said people shouldn’t enquire into. He had learned the ancient arts of alphabetizing and filing, the esoterica of reading and retrieving, the arcana of translation, the truth about the real age of life on earth.

  Without doubt there had been, so Izzy was taught, an earthian history which had lasted some billions of years, during which time life had emerged and gone through five stages. Stage one—once the earth had cooled down sufficiently to allow it—involved a spontaneous aggregation of molecules in ever greater variety until self-replicating forms were achieved. Then came speciation and complication of self-replicating forms in every and all kinds until intelligence was achieved and began to ramify. Izzy identified this second stage as gibbering and howling. Then in stage three, language emerged, and with language, the seeds of eventual destruction: concepts, memes, ideas.

  In stage four, memes multiplied, each two or three giving birth to dozens more. Also, they became self-perpetuating, using their biological carriers as copying machines. Vital concepts, deadly conceits, nonsense corruptions, all scrambled about in people’s brains as they transformed themselves into more and more complicated structures that began to accumulate into systems of philosophy and belief and be arranged into canons, all of which led people about, getting them into trouble, often getting them killed! Thought, in brief, imitated life in its evolutionary strategies.

  Oh, some societies saw the dangers inherent in thinking, but imposing thought control was like caulking a rotten boat, only a delaying tactic at best. The ideas would leak out. Or in. Censor though they might, people would learn to talk and repeat and dream. Or, as Izzy paraphrased his best friend among the Librarians: During the censorship phase, it is lethal to espouse free speech, and in the free speech phase, it is too late to espouse censorship. Unthinking things was, as Izzy had found out to his dismay, impossible.

  The final stage of life on earth came in two parts. Part A was when language inevitably begot literacy, which liberated ideas from the mind onto the page. Part B was when technology liberated ideas from the page into the network. Once so liberated, control of ideas became only a pretence. They spread like wildfire, aggregating and mutually destructing at every turn, changing reality more than mere creatures ever had. Self-replication had gone on in stable fashion for some billions of years; gibbering and howling had existed for hundreds of millions while making few changes; but only a few thousand years of idea proliferation changed reality both for good and bad in quite irreversible ways. So far, Izzy learned, idea proliferation had resulted in enormous though temporary scientific advances interrupted by the destruction of several successive civilizations, the last great one having ended some three thousand years before.

  This last cycle before the pre
sent, so Izzy read in the ancient machines, had ended in a “terrorist coup,” a holy war waged by some no longer existent set of ideas against all other ideas and their carriers. A disease had been used to wipe out most of the people in the world, including, presumably, all those who started hostilities. The people had had different tribal names then, of course. As best Izzy could identify them by their tribal characteristics, the ponjic people had been called Mericans, or maybe Joosh; the scuinic people had perhaps been Ahraban; the pheledic peoples had been Zhapanees; the armakfatidi had undoubtedly been Frynch; and the onchiki had been Skandians, people from the north. There had also been Stralians and Ladinos and Talians. It was possible the ersuniel people of the Farakian Empire had been Cherman or Stralian, but Izzy had no idea who the Talians could have been. Regardless of who they had been, almost all of them had been killed off.

  “Voilà, there we went,” said Izzy, throwing up his hands. “Back to gibbering and howling again. Back to the Dark Ages.”

  Unfortunately, people didn’t always go back far enough. Sometimes they ended up with the worst of both worlds, primitive enough to smell very bad but not quite herder-gatherer enough to walk away from the stink. Thus Izzy found himself living in a citified but sewerless Dark Age from which persons would, presumably, slowly slog their long way up again, through ignorance and heresy, back to science and self-destruction once more.

  Currently, there was no science worthy of the name.

  Among the Librarians and Linguists, which is what the dusty people who lived below called themselves, was one who had become a surrogate father to Izzy. His name was Old Mock, and it was he who had wiped Izzy’s childish tears and encouraged him when he was unhappy, and discouraged him when he wanted to do something silly or stupid, usually because one of his cousins put him up to it. Thus, when the reality of the prophecy finally began to sink in, it was down below to Old Mock that Izzy went for advice.