Susan Morse showed up in my office a little before they were due. “Just wanted to say hi,” she said. “So hi.” I hi-ed her back, and she added, “What’s up?”
I told her about the commotion the day before, and then about the forthcoming viewings. “Want to come along?”
She looked at me skeptically. “Not if it’s going to be like.…”
I didn’t see how it could be, I said so, and by the time we got to the cemetery, Mildred Cross’s Last Word was already up. It turned out to be a thick nest of cross-barred, blade-like leaves from which emerged a stout vine. The vine was already wrapped twice around the metal stake that would mark the grave until the ground firmed enough to support a stone.
Nobody said a word. The Sansevieria, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, was just too recognizable. And the vine needed no name, although Susan whispered in my ear, “I think it’s a strangler fig. I saw one once, at the Botanical Garden in Boston.”
Finally, someone said, “What about Eileen’s?” and the group moved on to find a thin, pale green tendril emerging from the ground. The tendril grew rapidly, developed thick thorns and leaves with sawtoothed edges, and finally the fattest blackberries I had ever seen.
Eileen Witham’s friends nodded their approval of her Last Word. It was as true as the millionaire’s, or Oscar Morse’s, or Mildred Cross’s. But these people, who had long tolerated the thorns because the fruit were so sweet, wanted that truth, not lies.
* * * *
Two days later, just as I was getting ready to go to the cemetery to meet the Whitcomb family for the viewing of Alec’s Last Word, I heard a clatter of shoe soles on the steps outside the funeral home. The front door banged open in loud defiance of decorum, feet thudded down the hall toward my office, and there was Susan, swinging around the edge of the doorway. She wore green, not black, with a necklace of false pearls around her throat, and her face had a sparkle I suspected she had not felt since high school days.
“I got a job!” she cried.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“He never let me, you know.” She sobered abruptly. “He said a woman’s place was in the home. He wanted me pregnant, but I stayed on the Pill. I didn’t tell him.” More gaily, then, she added, “Beth told me about the hospital office, and I took a medical office course once, and I applied, and.…” She let go of the doorframe and spun around. “I got the job!”
“I’m delighted,” I said. I was. “But I have to run. Alec Whitcomb’s Last Word is about to sprout. Want to come?”
She shook her head. “I start tomorrow. And I’ve got to shop. But.…” She paused. “Tell me later?”
We settled on dinner that evening, and then I really did have to rush. But as I drove to the cemetery, I had time to think how many years it had been since I had dated Susan. Now here she was, back in my life again and growing daily more so. I loved it. I thought I might very soon love her—and she might love me? I pinched the fat beneath my suit. I should lose some weight, I told myself.
I turned through the wrought-iron gates of the cemetery and put thoughts of Susan from my mind. There, ahead, was the Whitcomb family, with another couple I knew, Jack and Annie Holman. I thought they might be cousins of hers. I stopped, got out, shook hands, and counted heads. Dana Whitcomb had only two of her kids with her.
“Harold wouldn’t come,” she said. Harold, I knew, was the oldest. “He said he wants to forget the old bastard as soon as he can.”
I couldn’t blame him. Nor, I guessed, could his mother. There were tears in her eyes, and she clutched to her sides the two younger kids, a boy and a girl, just like in the Last Word brochure, but her mouth was a grim line that expressed both satisfaction and resolve to see this occasion through and say good-bye to Alec forevermore. Human feelings are rarely simple.
I pointed at the grave. The soil had already begun to crack, and a broad, fleshy leaf was poking its pointed tip into the air. The minutes passed, and Alec Whitcomb’s Last Word took shape: It was a simple pitcher plant, precisely the sort of thing you could find in any bog, perhaps a little larger.
Dana Whitcomb was looking puzzled. Jack Holman snorted. “He was a drunk, wasn’t he?”
“And the colors,” said Annie Holman. A pitcher plant is normally a mix of green and purple and a little yellow. It really takes very little imagination to see it as a mass of bruised flesh.
I would never have dreamed that a child abuser would so love the evidence of his blows. But the Last Word fungus supposedly never failed to unearth one’s truest obsessions.
Dana Whitcomb took one step forward, her hands never letting go of her children, swung a foot, and kicked her late husband’s Last Word as hard as she could. It broke off its stem and splattered on the grave’s metal temporary marker. “There,” she said. “So much for him.”
* * * *
There wasn’t much call for Last Words after that. I wasn’t surprised. The gengineered fungus could be downright embarrassing. Most folks just didn’t want as much insight into the character of the deceased as it could provide.
There were people who didn’t fear the truth, though. Augustus Orling was the preacher for the local Pentecostal Church, and when he died of a heart attack right in the middle of his Sunday sermon, the congregation agreed that he was so holy a man that any Last Words of his would have to be inspiring. And besides, he hadn’t finished his sermon. They only had to pass the plate once to come up with the price of a spore.
I shook my head when I told Susan about it. We were sitting side by side on the couch in her apartment. The TV was on, but the sound was too low to hear. “I hope,” I said, “that he was as righteous as they think he was.”
She giggled. “Do you think he could have had the same obsession as Oscar?”
“Not everyone’s a monster, Susan. Remember Eileen Witham.”
“That’s one out of how many?”
“There have to be more.”
“Maybe kids?”
I almost laughed. “Did you hear about Andy Chase?” Six years old, and they still hadn’t found the driver who had made it necessary for Frank to work overtime stitching him back together.
She nodded and said, “Did his folks buy him one?”
“No. But they didn’t want any embalming. So I gave him one anyway.” His funeral would be right after Reverend Orling’s.
* * * *
Ten days later, the Reverend’s congregation crowded around his grave. I was there too, with Susan, though we couldn’t get close enough for much of a view. We could hear, though, and what we heard bore every stamp of sheer delight:
“It’s an apple tree!”
“Don’t touch it!”
“Lovely fruit!”
“It’s right out of the Garden of Eden.”
“The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
“He knew, yes, he knew!”
“A sign against the modern world!” Except the word was “modren,” as country people sometimes say it.
“He was a righteous man. This proves it!”
“Amen!”
They milled and talked and milled some more. Finally, they departed, and we saw that Reverend Orling’s Last Word indeed resembled an apple tree. A small one, but the fruit were large and red.
“I thought Eden’s Tree was supposed to be a pomegranate,” said Susan.
“A pomegranate wouldn’t grow in Maine anyway.” I shrugged, stepped forward, and picked an apple. Its skin was hard and dry, like that of a ripe puffball. I bounced it in my hand. It was astonishingly light, as if, again like a puffball, it were mostly air within.
I tossed it to Susan. She caught it in a grip more suited to a genuine apple, and when her fingers crushed through the skin, there was a puff of brownish vapor and a hint of a bad smell.
“I
t’s just as well they didn’t pick one,” I said.
“It’s the Tree of Knowledge, all right.”
I took the remains of the apple from her hand, crumbled it to powder, and dropped it on the ground.
And when Susan said, “Isn’t it about time for Andy Chase’s?” I just shook my head.
He was young, too young to be cynical, or to have lost his innocence, or to have gone bad, or just sour. What would his Last Word say about his inmost thoughts and obsessions? Would it take the guise of a simple posy? Would it say he craved a puppy, or a kitten? Would it speak of love and sweetness, those things the poets would have us believe are the hallmarks of childhood, that Eden of the soul?
But kids could be awful stinkers, couldn’t they? They could be just as bad as adults. They could be even worse, for they had not yet learned to hide their hatreds and nastinesses and deficits of faith.
When the salesman came back, I would give him back his spores and brochures and pay him what I owed him. I had just decided I didn’t really want to know any more inmost secrets, whether of children or of adults, unless they gave them freely.
I took Susan by the elbow and turned our path toward the gate. “I don’t even want to know,” I said. “Dinner?”
“There is a restaurant I’d like to try.”
“Well, then.…”
THE PRICE
The pursuit of change never ends.
The Makers were gone.
There remained only the People, and the Wild Ones beyond their rocky vantage. The latter howled among the trees of the forest. Sticks and rocks rattled among the boulders. A fruit splatted near Peter’s feet. It was over-ripe, and it stank. He plucked a leaf to wipe the juice from the fur of his legs. He had no female who might do that for him. Nor had he cubs. Yet he had the respect of all, for he was the fire-maker, and his skull was the largest of all.
The People’s leader was Joseph, the eldest among them, first-Made. Now he stooped for a rock, hefted it, and screamed in challenge. He threw, and a second yell answered him. A Wild One dashed from cover on three legs, cradling a large tree-nut against his chest. He stopped, rose to his hind feet, and hurled the nut. Joseph stepped aside to avoid the missile and screamed again.
The Wild Ones had no speech, only their troops and the forest. They ran on all fours more often than not, and their plump bodies bore no trace of clothing. Their heads were small, their muzzles sharp, and their tails prehensile. They were ignorant and savage, beasts that denned in burrows and hollow logs.
The People were as plump, but their heads were large and rounded, their muzzles blunted. The Makers had wished it so, though their wishes had also cost the People the usefulness of their tails. But they did have thought and speech now, and they knew the value of straps and pouches knotted from strips of bark.
They proved it as Joseph roared to his followers. “Small rocks!” Each dipped into a waist-pouch for a handful of pebbles. “Line up!” They formed a line, facing their harassers. “Get ’em!” They marched forward, hurling pebbles whenever they sighted the smaller figure of a Wild One, evoking shrill yelps and cries of pain. They drove the beasts into the forest until they could see no more, though the howls still resounded. They established their territory as they had before and would again, and then they returned to the rocky bluff that overlooked the valley below.
The valley still stood empty. There was more forest beyond the river. On this side were vast lawns, already returning to meadow. Where the many houses had stood were patches of bare dirt turning green with new grass and weeds. The gravel paths were losing their edges. The concrete pad where the ships had landed, and lately left, shone in the sun.
The valley was a world in miniature from which most human presence had been erased. The people were gone, their noise and their machinery and their dwellings. There remained only their spoor, fast fading before the green pressure of an alien nature, and a single structure, a monument, an obelisk two hundred meters high. They had built it just before their departure, a rod of black iron socketed deep in soil and rock, its peak rimmed by an inaccessable lip. Its purpose, said the Makers, was to house a store of knowledge. When the People could scale its height and enter the room beyond the lip, they would be ready for the gift. In the meantime, they must devise their own answers to the problems of existence, their own tools and weapons, clothing and resources.
For now, the People shunned the valley and its marker, its paths and water and food. They stayed on the overlooking heights, among the trees and brush. They fed easily and well on nuts and fruits and roots and the smallest of game. They traded stones with their unMade kin. And they hunkered on the rocks of their bluff, staring down at the place of their making.
As night approached, the People spread out to gather food. The cubs collected dead wood and piled it beside Peter’s rock. When he judged the pile was large enough, he drew a pinch of dry moss from his pouch, a small stone, and a bar of iron he had taken from the Makers. He had stolen it, truly. The Makers had said they wished to remove their influence from the People, lest they become something not their own. They had taken all their marvels aboard their ships. They had taken back gifts of clothing, water bottles, and children’s toys. They had even combed the grass around their houses for lost tools and gathered up their many leavings. Yet they had missed the broken hammer head Peter had buried near the river.
He struck a spark, blew it gently into flame, and laid twigs upon it. Soon he had their fire, light and comfort for the dark, a source of heat for the singeing of rodents and birds, all that they could hope to capture in their hands or with their pebbles.
There was still light in the sky when Joseph climbed atop a large boulder near the verge of their bluff. He rose to his feet, faced the valley, and raised his arms, claws sheathed. He tilted his muzzle toward the scattered clouds. He would have uttered the first cry of the evening ritual had not a female first asked, “Where is my cub?”
There was a stirring among the People. “My cub!” No answer came; no child scrambled through the rocks. “My cub!” The cry grew pained, and several males left the gathering in search.
Still there was no answer. The People rose and spread out toward the forest of the Wild Ones. Peter went with them, searching for a wandering cub, yet also loading his arms with more bits of wood for his fire. There was another cry, and he followed the rest to a shadowing shrub and a small, tattered body. The head had been smashed. A stained rock lay beside it. One arm was gone. The belly and thighs were torn where the Wild Ones had feasted.
The mother whimpered as they gathered up the body, but she was quiet as they cast it from the bluff into the valley. She whimpered again as Joseph remounted his rock, and raised arms and muzzle once more to the sky. “Makers! We remember you. We await your return. We wait to join you in Sky.”
The invocation—for it was that—ended there. Peter let his lips retract as Joseph dismounted and approached the fire, where the food awaited. The ritual was young, but it would grow. The Makers, who called themselves Men, had predicted that. They had told Peter—and others as well—that they wished to make People for every world of life, that they would raise up a few from Wild Ones and then leave them to grow in numbers and knowledge. They knew it must happen at times, but they did not care to be seen as gods. They hoped to return one day to find thinking beings who might be their equals and companions. They refused to make that equality a gift. It must be attained, and not by these seeds of the People. It was a goal for their descendants.
The meal done, the People pressed nearer the fire. Peter held a stick as long as his arm and poked at the embers. He watched the wood char and flame, and he thought. Would they even have descendants? The Wild Ones were against them, and tonight’s cub was not the first to die. There would be more. Perhaps there would be all, and the People would vanish. There would be no companions then, no fulfillment of pr
omises and dreams.
He smothered the flames by plunging his stick into the gravelly soil at his feet. He held the smoking tip before his eyes, and he pondered. It was rounded, narrowed, layered with soft char, the splinters of breaking vanished. His nose wrinkled at the smell. He lowered the stick and began to scrape its end across a rock. He left black streaks, yet not all the tip would rub away. His efforts revealed a tapered, sharpened core.
He held the stick again before his eyes. He studied it, and the nearest of the People saw what he held. A female—was she the one whose cub had died tonight?—asked, “Would that pierce a Wild One?”
It was not one of the Makers’ guns, but he said, “It might.” As his words hung in the air, there was a slow reaching for sticks, long and short, straight and curved. There was a charring and rubbing and a chatter of intention.
The dawn, as usual, was heralded by a howling of Wild Ones. Fruits and sticks and rocks flew among the People. Peter snarled when a stone splashed hot ash against his ankle. The People seized their new weaponry and dashed toward the forest. Most hurled their sharpened sticks like clubs. Some slashed and flailed. Two thrust, and they despatched their targets.
Though it was not night, Peter rebuilt his fire. His fellows wished to scorch the fallen Wild Ones. They wished to eat as their cubs had been eaten, and he shared the wish. He accepted a strip of flesh. He savored the smell and the taste. Yet when he looked at the body it had come from, he shuddered. They were so like the People.
They were like the People in more than form alone, for they were neither stupid nor unobservant. That much became clear with the next attack, when the sun stood high and a few of the People’s males, Peter among them, were preparing to hunt. Miguel, a youth still lacking the dark back-stripe of maturity, was their leader, for it was he who had said, “The sticks pierce Wild Ones. They will pierce the trotters of the forest too. They are too big for our stones and claws, but these sticks will kill.” He had held his stick aloft then and shaken it, brandishing it. Another had cried, “The leapers!” but Miguel had said, “Too fast.”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 14
