This is my indirect message to them, if they still come for the others like me that they made. The information they take is imbued with the mess I’ve made in it. So they can do something about me, or they can live with their poisoned knowledge.
As for me, with nothing to lose, I will go underground again for the worst of the summer heat and then the onset of cold weather. When spring comes, I’ll poke my head up with the other things from under the earth. And when it is Juin once again, I will go back to the Seine, to her old spot, drive away anyone who might be on it before I strip off my clothes and lie down for the entertainment and edification of the commuters on the Edith Piaf Batobus, and I will drink in whatever essence of humanity that I find under the sun.
And when it gets dark and the rats draw close, I will tell them everything. Everything. Everything. And if I’m still alive when the sun comes up, I’ll do it all again.
FLOWERING MANDRAKE
George Turner
An Australian writer and critic of great renown, George Turner may be that country’s most distinguished science fiction writer, and one of the few Australian SF writers to have established an international reputation that transcends parochial boundaries. Although he has published six mainstream novels, he is best known in the genre for the string of unsentimental, rigorous, and sometimes acerbic science fiction novels that he began to publish in 1978, including Beloved Son, Vaneglory, Yesterday’s Men, Brain Child, In the Heart or in the Head, The Destiny Makers, and the widely acclaimed Drowning Towers, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His most recent novel is Genetic Soldier. His short fiction has been collected in A Pursuit of Miracles, and he is the editor of the anthology of Australian science fiction, The View from the Edge.
Turner may be the Grandmaster of Australian science fiction, and, true, he is decades older than his next-most-talked-about compatriot, Greg Egan … but he has lost none of his imagination or intellectual vigor, as he proves in the powerful and ingenious story that follows, a tale unsurpassed by any Young Turks anywhere for the bravura sweep and daring of its conceptualization.
Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root …
From the song, ‘Go, and catch’, by John Donne.
Four stars make Capella: two G-type suns sharing between them five times the mass of Terra’s Sol and two lesser lights seen only with difficulty from a system so far away.
Two of the fifteen orbiting worlds produced thinking life under fairly similar conditions but the dominant forms which evolved on each bore little resemblance to each other save in the possession of upright carriage, a head, and limbs for ambulation and grasping.
When, in time, they discovered each other’s existence, they fought with that ferocity of civilized hatred which no feral species can or need to match.
The Red-Bloods fought at first because they were attacked, then because they perceived that the Green Folk were bent not on conquest but on destruction. The Green Folk fought because the discovery of Red-Blood dominance over a planet uncovered traits deep in their genetic structure. Evolution had been for them a million year struggle against domination by emerging red-blooded forms and their eventual supremacy had been achieved only by ruthless self-preservation—the destruction of all competition. They kept small animals for various domestic and manufacturing purposes, even ate them at times for gourmet pleasure rather than need and feared them not at all, but the ancient enmity and dread persisted in racial defensiveness like a memory in the blood.
The discovery of a planet of Red-Bloods with a capacity for cultural competition wreaked psychological havoc. Almost without thought the Green Folk attacked.
Ships exploded, ancient cities drowned in fresh-sprung lava pits, atmospheres were polluted with death.
* * *
Beyond the Capellan system no sentient being knew of species in conflict. Galactic darkness swallowed the bright, tiny carnage.
Capella lay some forty-seven light years from the nearest habitable planet, which its people called, by various forms of the name, Terra.
* * *
Only one member of crew, a young officer of the Fifth Brachiate, new to his insignia and with little seniority, but infinitely privileged over the Root-kin of his gunnery unit, escaped the destruction of Deadly Thorn. His name (if it matters, because it was never heard anywhere again) was Fernix, which meant in the Old Tongue, ‘journeying forest father’.
When the Triple Alert flashed he was in the Leisure Mess, sucking at a tubule of the stem, taking in the new, mildly stimulating liquor fermented from the red fluid of animals. It was a popular drink, not too dangerously potent, taken with a flick of excitement for the rumour that it was salted with the life-blood of enemy captives. This was surely untrue but made a good morale boosting story.
Triple Alerts came a dozen a day and these bored old hands of the war no longer leapt to battle stations like sprouts-in-training. Some hostile craft a satellite’s orbit distant had detected Deadly Thorn and launched a missile; deflector arrays would catch and return it with augmented velocity and the flurry would be over before they reached the doorway.
There was, of course, always the unlucky chance. Deflector arrays had their failings and enemy launchers their moments of cunning.
Fernix was still clearing his mouth when an instant of brilliant explosion filled space around Deadly Thorn and her nose section and Command Room blew out into the long night.
He was running, an automaton trained to emergency, when the sirens screamed and through the remaining two-thirds of the ship the ironwood bulkheads thudded closed. He was running for his Brachiate Enclave, where his Root-kin waited for orders, when the second missile struck somewhere forward of him and on the belly plates five decks below.
A brutal rending and splintering rose under him and at his running feet the immensely strong deck-timbers tore apart in a gaping mouth that he attempted uselessly to cross in a clumsy, shaken leap. Off balance and unprepared, he felt himself falling into Cargo Three, the Maintenance Stores hold.
At the same moment ship’s gravity vanished and the lighting system failed. Deadly Thorn was Dead Thorn. Fernix tumbled at a blind angle into darkness, arms across his head against crashing into a pillar or bulkhead at speed. In fact his foot caught in a length of rope, dragging him to a jarring halt.
Spread arms told him he had been fortunate to land on a stack of tarpaulins when it might as easily have been the sharp edges of tool boxes. Knowledge of the Issue Layout told him precisely where he was in the huge hold. There was a nub of escape pods in the wall not far to his left. He moved cautiously sideways, not daring to lose contact in null-gravity darkness but slithering as fast as he safely might.
Bulkheads had warped in the broken and twisted hull; both temperature and air pressure were dropping perceptibly.
He found the wall of the hold at the outer skin and moved slowly towards the vanished fore section until he felt the swelling of the nub of pods and at last the mechanism of an entry lock. Needing a little light to align the incised lines which would spring the mechanism, he pumped sap until the luminescent buds of his right arm shed a mild greenish radiance on the ironwood.
He thought momentarily, regretfully, of his Root-kin crew able to move only a creeper-length from their assigned beds, awaiting death without him. In this extremity he owed them no loyalty and they would expect none but they would, he hoped, think well of him. They were neuters, expendable and aware of it whereas he, Officer Class free-moving breeder, carried in him the gift of new life. There could be no question of dying with them though sentimental ballads wept such ideas; they, hard-headed pragmatists, would think it the act of an idiot. And they would be right.
He matched the lock lines and stepped quickly in as the fissure opened. As he closed the inner porte the automatic launch set the pod drifting gently into space.
He activated fresh luminescence to find the control panels and light switch. A low-powered light—perhaps forty watts—sh
one in the small space. To his eyes it was brilliant and a little dangerous; to a culture which made little use of metals, the power-carrying copper wires were a constant threat to wood, however tempered and insulated.
To discover where he was with respect to Deadly Thorn, he activated an enzyme flow through the ironwood hull at a point he judged would offer the best vision. As the area cleared he was able to see the lightless hulk occulting stars. The entire forward section was gone, perhaps blown to dust, and a ragged hole gaped amidships under the belly holds. If other pods floated nearby he could not see them.
Poised weightless over the controls, he checked the direction of the three-dimensional compass point in its bowl and saw that the homing beam shone steadily with no flicker from intervening wreckage. His way was clear and his duty certain, to return to the Home World carrying his spores of life.
A final, useless missile must have struck Deadly Thorn as he stretched for the controls and never reached them. A silent explosion dazzled his eyes, then assaulted his hearing as the shock wave struck the pod. A huge plate of Deadly Thorn’s armour loomed in the faint glow of his light, spinning lazily to strike the pod a glancing blow that set it tumbling end over end.
He had a split second for cursing carelessness because he had not strapped down at once. Then his curled up, frightened body bounced back and forth from the spinning walls until his head struck solidly and unconsciousness took him.
* * *
He came to in midair with legs bunched into his stomach and arms clasped round his skull. There was no gravity; he was falling free. But where?
Slow swimming motions brought him to a handhold but he became aware of a brutal stiffness in his right side. He pumped sap to make fingerlight, bent his head to the ribplates and saw with revulsion that he was deformed; the plates had been broken and had healed while he floated, but had healed unevenly in a body curled up instead of stretched. Surgery would rectify that—but first he must find a surgeon.
He was struck unpleasantly by the fact that even his botched joining would have occupied several months of the somatic shutdown which had maintained him in coma while the central system concentrated on healing. (He recalled sourly that the RedBloods healed quickly, almost on the run.)
Deity only knew where in space he might be by now.
But what had broken his body?
There were no sharp edges in the pod. Something broken, protruding spikes?
Shockingly, yes. The compass needle had been wrenched loose and the transparent, glassy tegument, black with his sap, lay shattered around it.
He thought, I am lost, but not yet with despair; there were actions to be taken before despair need be faced. He fed the hull, creating windows. Spaces cleared, opening on darkness and the diamond points of far stars. He found no sign of Deadly Thorn; he might have drifted a long way from her after the blast. He looked for the Home World, palely green, but could not find it; nor could he see the bluer, duller sister-world of the red-sapped, animal enemy.
Patiently he scanned the sky until a terrifying sight of the double star told him his search was done. It was visible still as a pair but as the twin radiances of a distant star. Of the lesser companions he could see nothing; their dimness was lost in the deep sky.
He had drifted unbelievably far. He could not estimate the distance; he remembered only from some long ago lecture that the double star might appear like this from a point beyond the orbit of the outermost planet, the dark fifteenth world.
The sight spoke not of months of healing but of years.
Only a brain injury …
Every officer carried a small grooming mirror in his tunic; with it Fernix examined the front and sides of his skull as well as he was able. Tiny swellings of healed fractures were visible, telling him that the braincase had crushed cruelly in on his frontal lobes and temples. Regrowth of brain tissue had forced them out again but the marks were unmistakeable. In the collision with the wreckage of Deadly Thorn he had crashed disastrously into … what?
The whole drive panel was buckled and cracked, its levers broken off or jammed down hard in their guides. They were what had assaulted him. Acceleration at top level had held him unconscious until the last drops in the tank were consumed, releasing him then to float and commence healing.
Fearfully he examined the fuel gauges. The Forward Flight gauge was empty, its black needle flush with the bottom.
The Retro fuel gauge still showed full, indicating precisely enough to balance the Forward gauge supply and bring the pod to a halt—enough, he realized drearily, to leave him twice as far from home as he now was, because the buckled panel had locked the steering jet controls with the rest. He could not take the pod into the necessary end for end roll. Only the useless deceleration lever still seemed free in its guides. The linkages behind the panel might still be operable but he had no means of reaching them and no engineering skill to achieve much if he did.
He was more than lost; he was coffined alive.
Something like despair, something like fear shook his mind as he eased himself into the pilot’s seat, bruises complaining, but his species was not given to the disintegrative emotions. He sat quietly until the spasm subsided.
His actions now were culturally governed; there could be no question of what he would do. He was an officer, a carrier of breeding, and the next generation must be given every chance, however small, to be born. Very small, he thought. His pod could drift for a million years without being found and without falling into the gravity field of a world, let alone a livable world, but the Compulsion could not be denied. The Compulsion had never been stated in words; it was in the genes, irrevocable.
Calmly now, he withdrew the hull enzymes and blacked out the universe. He started the air pump and the quiet hiss of intake assured him that it was operative still. As the pressure tank filled with the withdrawn atmosphere he made the mental adjustment for Transformation. As with the Compulsion, there were no words for what took place. Psychologists theorized and priests pontificated but when the time and the circumstance came together, the thing happened. The process was as intangible as thought, about whose nature there was also no agreement. The thought and the need and the will formed the cultural imperative and the thing happened.
Before consciousness left him, perhaps for ever, Fernix doused the internal heating, which was not run from the ruined drive panel.
Resuscitation he did not think about. That would take place automatically if the pod ever drifted close enough to a sun for its hull to warm appreciably, but that would not, could not happen. Deity did not play at Chance-in-a-Million with His creation.
Consciousness faded out. The last wisps of air withdrew. The temperature fell slowly; it would require several days to match the cold of space.
The Transformation crept over him as a hardening of his outer skin, slowly, slowly, until his form was sheathed in seamless bark. Enzymes clustered at the underside of his skin, fostering a hardening above and below until tegument and muscle took on the impermeability of ironwood. Officer of the Fifth Brachiate Fernix had become a huge, complex spore drifting in galactic emptiness.
He was, in fact, drifting at a surprising speed. A full tank expended at full acceleration had cut out with the pod moving at something close to six thousandths of the speed of light.
The pod’s automatic distress signal shut down. It had never been heard amidst the radio noise of battle fleets. The interior temperature dropped towards zero and the vegetal computers faded out as ion exchange ceased. The pod slept.
* * *
Nearly eight thousand Terrestrial years passed before the old saying was disproved: Deity did indeed play at Chance-in-a-Million with His creation.
* * *
Vegetal computers were more efficient than a metal-working culture would readily believe, though they could not compete in any way with the multiplex machines of the animal foe—in any, that is, except one.
The pod’s computers were living things in the sense tha
t any plant is a living thing. They were as much grown as fashioned, as much trained as programmed, and their essential mechanisms shared one faculty with the entity in Transformation who slept in his armour: They could adopt the spore mode and recover from it in the presence of warmth.
They had no way of detecting the passage of millennia as they slept but their links to the skin of the pod could and did react to the heat of a G-type sun rushing nearer by the moment.
As the outer temperature rose, at first by microscopic increments, then faster and faster, the computer frame sucked warmth from the hull and, still at cryogenic levels, returned to minimal function.
At the end of half a day the chemical warming plant came silently into operation and the internal temperature climbed towards normal. Automatically the Life Maintenance computer opened the air tank to loose a jet of snow that evanesced at once into invisible gases.
The miracle of awakening came to Fernix. His outer tegument metamorphosed, cell by cell, into vegetal flesh as his body heat responded; first pores, then more generalized organs sucked carbon dioxide from the air and return from Transformation began.
Emergence into full consciousness was slow, first as an emptiness in which flashes of dreams, inchoate and meaningless, darted and vanished; then as a closer, more personal space occupied by true dreams becoming ever more lucid as metabolism completed its regeneration; finally as an awareness of self, of small pressures from the restricted pilot’s seat, of sap swelling in capillaries and veins, of warmth and the sharp scent of too-pure air. His first coherent thought was that a good life caterer would have included some forest fragrance, mulch or nitrate, in the atmosphere tank.
From that point he was awake, in full muscular and mental control, more swiftly than a Red-Blood could have managed. (But the Red-Bloods had no Transformation refuge that the scientists could discover; in deep cold or without air they died and quickly rotted. They were disgusting.)
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 46
