And by now he’s going, ‘But, but, but’, like a fish out of water.
So I go on: ‘If you think I can be pushed around by a saddo who’s failed to make a life for himself and who can’t cope with retiring, then you’ve got another thought coming. You’re just a desiccated old fool and you’re sucking me dry, draining the juice out of me!’
At that, he looked embarrassed and left me alone.
Inspector of Wrecks
In all my years in the Service, I’ve never been spoken to like that. The woman’s neurotic. All my training tells me that I have to maintain an adult demeanour and not descend to her level of hysteria.
I think back to the scenario in VR, to see what might have sparked such an outburst, but I can’t see it. Gwydion and Math are just finding their way around a curse in a most delightful and original way, I can’t wait to see what happens next.
What can have got into her? Should I read the Riot Act? Or ignore the outburst?
It’s not that I haven’t got a private life. My work life is it and when that’s gone, what’s left for me?
I told her to take an hour off and that I expected her to report to the VR suite at 11:30 to carry on. Won’t do either of us any harm to cool down.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 11:40
Inspector of Wrecks
The girl’s a No Show. I’m going to go on my own and finish the task in hand. I will not let the slip of a girl mess up my investigation, especially not my very last one.
Right, back to business. Here’s Gwydion and Math in consultation together. I take the point of view of Math because I’m convinced that he has overall control of what’s happening.
And suddenly I know the recipe for making a woman out of flowers.
Math says, ‘Bring me oak flowers, meadowsweet and broom.’
Gwydion says, ‘But none of those flowers are yet in bloom.’
Math: ‘You’re a wizard, make it happen.’
I watch as Gwydion shuts his eyes. And although it’s winter, I notice buds appearing on the oak nearby. The whole tree is quivering as if with desire. Time goes haywire. Days strobe on the patient branches and leaves protrude, shrugging and sighing as the quick days pass. Then the catkins of male flowers descend. A jay leaves a branch and a cloud of pollen drifts to the next oak tree, where the subtle female flowers swell close to the branches, sticky and red. Gwydion brings branches of the fertile oak to Math’s feet.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:03
Apprentice
You know when you’re young and you have all day to look at things and dream? When grass is at eye level? And its seeds are your equal? How you make palaces from the sun as it filters through blades of grass and you can live in those mansions?
I wake exhausted from dreams of green. Creeping bent, sweet vernal-grass, wood fescue, Timothy, great reedmace, wood millet. I remember how we would loop its stalk around the broad-leaved plantain and decapitate its dry, brown flower. I recall the acidic smell of skin having skidded along grass, the cold, damp ache of its smudge into flesh.
But I was brought up on Mars. I know we used to play under the biosphere on the artificial pastures there but I never knew the names of Earth grasses.
I try to wake up, but I find it hard. A caffeine shot will help, some food before the next shift. I feel like a loom on which something is being woven.
Wall barley, grass, pendulous sedge…
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:14
Inspector of Wrecks
‘That,’ says Gwydion, ‘was late May or June.’
Then Math asks for flowers of the broom.
‘Why?’ asks Gwydion.
‘Because it’s tough. The oak can self-pollinate but the broom blooms earlier, in late April, and its flowers appear before its leaves. Its seedpods explode in July when ripe. The medicines made from it are designed to purge, whereas the oak is astringent. And the country folk bring sprigs of broom to weddings as a gift.’
In the underbrush one leggy bush goes crazy and explodes in yellow, with a thick, rich smell of almond butter. Gwydion brings branches back to Math’s feet.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:23
Apprentice
My chlorophyll dreams don’t leave me, nor do the names of plants. Sweet William, stitchwort, wood anemone… It’s as if there’s a feed from someone else’s mind into mine and I’m overhearing a world.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:39
Inspector of Wrecks
‘And last,’ says Math, ‘the meadowsweet.’
‘My favourite flower,’ says Gwydion. ‘Also known as queen of the meadows or bridewort. Most common of the fragrant weeds, whose blossoms are culled in the middle of July. It’s good for fevers and a woman made from that scent – sickly but creamy – must be beautiful to look at. According to Gerard, the smell of the leaves “Makes the heart merry and delighteth the senses.” Sounds like a winner to me.’
‘We’ll have most of the summer covered then,’ says Math. ‘Broom early in spring; a fragrant meadowsweet July and high summer the oak with its flowers.’
So Gwydion stands there and pillages time to conjure up meadowsweet. And the tall stalks shake as if in ecstasy. They bloom.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:54
Apprentice
I stand erect. I have no eyes but a feel for gravity, from my dark, damp root up to the finest veins and the tips of my flowers. I’m a translator, a poet of the sun, transforming the spectrum into tiny hands that move in light’s wake, stroking the world with blind but sensitive tendrils.
I have no ears, but my body bursts through the skin of buds, its surface area grows, and feels how vegetation scuffles, groans in competition for the light. I smell the stress that tearing, striving, being crushed, causes in wild garlic, dog’s mercury and squill. And as the Earth turns, like a dancer with a pliant back, I shift my weight to stay upright in my perfect static pirouette until, with grace, I take my bow as darkness falls and close my leaves.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 13:06
Inspector of Wrecks
And then we join forces, Gwydion and I. We imagine the perfect woman for Lleu. She’s sultry as early spring days, long, slender and bright as the stalks of Genista. She’s modest as meadowsweet but has a whole spectrum of emotional life, as complex as its fragrance. She’s strong as oak, resilient as acorns that swell from the buds of the flowers. She pulls animals and birds in close to her, is a shelter.
And the body we conjure out of buds, flowers and seeds isn’t an orphan. She’s our daughter – mine and Math’s. It’s our minds that give birth to her, in the shape of our delights, our fondness, our grief. Maybe our failings. And we lay her to grow in the best of ourselves, making room for a consciousness not our own, but that of the forest’s. And it feels like pain but isn’t as we’ve woven her out of everything that we both know about love and awareness and we’re sure it’s enough, that its generosity can make up for the loss of a mother, that our meaning well will do right by Lleu and create a home which is a form of justice that the boy deserves.
And in the middle of this I, Campion, ask: What kind of being does a virtual world create? If two negatives make a positive, then can two virtuals make an actual? Have we just conjured up a person who’s real? Or one who is death?
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 14:30
Apprentice
I lie here with my eyes half open and something works its way with me.
I dream of cells illuminated by a soft green light. Chloroplast. Ribosomes. Organelles, packed tight like batteries. I find galleries of green within myself, strings of proteins, they breathe through fibres. I’m in a forest of amino acids – protein chains which sway, like saplings, then blossom with molecular flowers. I move like mercury through the maze of matter. Cells throb, growth happens in jumps. I stretch, luxurious in the light,
knowing that my intelligence is a web of filaments and filigrees, specialised in feeding on the tiniest amounts for the greatest results. Inside is sap which is drawn out by capillary action and soon a new energy runs up my spine, a pulse of excitement. How will things look from this new point of view?
Everything’s possible, ripens in me. I follow the sun and in the dark, I bow in obedience. I am unknowable to Math and Gwydion, hum with information that they just infer from their loud talk and posturing. I reach up to the spires of giant oaks and down into mosses where I gather myself in the heart of the root web. I flex my muscles with an old, old power.
Death doesn’t alarm me. That makes me alien to them. I can make patterns from how things decay. I take joy in the humus and I bury light as easy as bask in it, so that the webs in between the fingers I stretch to their limit, and my ears and my toes are translucent and beautiful as decay.
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 15:15
Inspector of Wrecks
I leave the VR, exhausted. We haven’t yet seen the woman that Math and I’ve made from flowers. All in good time.
I get to the module and I’m knocked sideways by the smell. Nona’s been shopping, quite brazenly, on the work computer and has bought, of all things, perfume.
She doesn’t refer to the row we had earlier, but holds out her wrist for me to smell the fragrance she’s chosen. It makes me feel sick.
Apprentice
Of course, I went for a chypre, as I’m a woman of mystery. Storax, labdanum and calamus – an oriental aroma since Roman times. Produced in France as Cyprus powder, with oak moss as its base. There used to be a fashion for tiny birds – oiselets de Chypre – moulded out of a perfume paste, requiring Benjamin, cloves, cinnamon, calamus and gum tragacanth as ingredients. They were hung in ornate cages.
I choose a dark fragrance. Floral or sweet doesn’t suit my character any more. My skin must be changing, so I crave the aromatics that won’t leave you alone, that you’re not sure you like, but which your brain craves, like fermented food. It’s the kind of perfume that’s an acquired taste.
I tried quite a few, but came up with this modern chypre. Base note of oak moss, patchouli, clary sage, with flowery notes of jasmine and hint of bergamot, lemon.
Or there’s this classic: Ma Griffe. In the base notes, storax and oak moss predominate, with hints of cinnamon, benzoin, labdanum and musk.
Or broom – Madame Rochas!
He
I don’t know what to say to her. Such a cacophony of strong perfumes in a confined space could be construed as a form of assault.
I tell her, ‘Get rid of it.’
She looks at me blankly.
She
I find it hard to understand what he’s saying. I feel heat on my back, as the sun swings round. I leave him and his anger; move inside to my bunk so that I can stretch out in the light. I can feel it coming through the hull as if there were no ship around us.
He
Women go funny once a month. I’ll give her this afternoon but if this continues tomorrow, I’ll be going home early and dumping her. I don’t care about the investigation or what they say. I can’t have a subordinate behave in this way. Gwydion would never stand for it.
What did I just think?
12
Wife
Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 09:00
Inspector of Wrecks
So she comes to me early and says: ‘Sorry about yesterday. Won’t happen again.’ Everything’s back to normal. Not a word about what happened. Call me a coward, but I let it rest. I’m just relieved that Nona’s behaving like herself again.
Apprentice
And I tell him that I think that the game has moved from the VR suite and into my head. He says nothing for a little while then asks me, did I drink anything from the shipwrecked vessel’s water supply?
He
My first thought was that she’d swallowed nano-bots, a later form of VR. It was the intermediary technology between the ancient VR and neuro games, now children have the transistor implants into their frontal lobes when they get their jabs. But she says no.
She
I can try to control it. Do you ever hear sounds like a roaring of waters inside your head, perhaps the cerebrospinal fluids as they circulate round the dura mater and the pia mater membranes? I’ve tried listening to the noise, even as it drives me mad, letting it roar to its full volume. Then, when I can’t bear it any longer, I hold it still. So with yesterday’s living dream. I saw it, I lived it and now I choose not to let it spill out of the VR frame and into my life. I can control it.
He
I pretend not to know what she means. But I do. So, I’m brusque and businesslike. We put on the helmets to see where we stand.
Joint Thought Channel 9 Feb 2210, 09:02
Inspector of Wrecks
The scene in front of us looks like a tarot card: The Lovers. Math stands between Lleu and his bride, whose back is to us.
Nona, if you like I’ll take her part.
Apprentice
No, it’s all right. You want to be Math for good reasons. I’ll take her. It’ll be all right.
Inspector of Wrecks
If you’re sure. I just think that Math is king of this realm and that I haven’t paid enough attention to his interface.
Apprentice
With what?
Inspector of Wrecks
That’s the thing. I still need to find that out. So, you get to be bride.
Apprentice
And was there ever a bride like me? I’m the one who all the girls are trying to be with their pinks and creams, bouquets and manicures.
Inspector of Wrecks
And Math officiates and the two are wed. What’s she like?
Apprentice
Full of awareness and rage to live.
Inspector of Wrecks
She looks all sweetness.
Apprentice
She isn’t. She speaks in fragrances. Now her pores exude the smell of almond. I wonder, how keen is Lleu’s sense of smell?
Inspector of Wrecks
Math’s very sensitive. Not sure about Lleu. He seems impassive, looking very pale.
Math’s a kind of scientist of the forest. This is what he perceives: top notes made from the sexual secretions of flowers, odours mimicking the animal’s own sex pheromones. There’s a faecal whiff there somewhere.
Middle notes: resins that also recall the sexual smells that attract creatures useful for pollination.
Top notes: floral. Innocuous, sweet. A cover for the real business below in the sex juices.
Apprentice
She’s hypersensitive to light and has placed herself, like a fashion model, to best effect under the spotlight of available sun. It looks like vanity, but it’s not. It’s the drive to survive.
She dances without moving. Her mind makes large gestures in scent.
Inspector of Wrecks
I’m getting it, loud and clear. She’s nervous but curious, puzzled by what’s happened. There’s stress in the mixture. A touch of toxin.
Apprentice
She stares at her husband. Her sight’s acute but attuned to temperature. She senses the exact gradations of heat on his flesh, the scarlet groin and armpits, the way the body cools at its green extremities. To her he’s a multicoloured body.
He turns to her and speaks. She can see his lips moving but can’t hear noise, only as vibration. She turns to Math. He vibrates at her too.
Inspector of Wrecks
Gwydion and I will have to work on that, she needs to learn language.
She
I’m a synaesthesiac. Noise runs through the filaments of nerves in this new… shape. I’m hungry and I need to eat light.
I look down at myself and feel a shock. What kind of a flower have I become?
The plant next to me takes my hand, his face grows larger. He smells disgusting and I pull away.
Then the full horror of what’s happened t
o me hits me: I am a flower made of meat.
*
Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 16:00
Apprentice
Do you think the people who lived on this ship ever imagined that we’d be poking around, trying to find out what happened to them? If they had, surely they would have left more clues. An accurate log? An SOS before they all died? A message in a bottle?
Maybe they did but we just don’t recognise it. Campion thinks that it’s all in the VR but I’m trying to tell him that it’s moved outside.
It’s as if we are the imagination of the ship. What happens between us is what it wills. Only he doesn’t yet know it.
I feel autistic, as if the world is standing too close for comfort. Movement’s disturbing, as I have to track even the tiniest change of angle, disposition. I feel light moving around me, and I follow it, inching like an invalid around the module. I find I like to sit where the sun hits the hull and I turn my face to the wall, basking. I’ve moved my hammock to the other end of the capsule, to maximise my time in the light.
Lack of gravity confuses me now as it never did when I first came on board. I feel I’m growing in a vacuum and my mind doesn’t know which way is up.
When Campion talks to me, I look at his mouth, hoping that lipreading will make some sense of the words but it doesn’t. So I nod, make sounds back, don’t know what I’m saying half the time.
What’s different is that I feel his heat wherever he is. When Campion moves above me along the cabin sole, the shadow he throws moves across me. After all, I’m married to light. I want the full glare of his attention, though Campion never gives it. I need it like food and yet the man is fiddling with logs and with manuals in which I’ve lost all interest.
The Meat Tree Page 8
