After the Red Rain

by Lyga, Barry

  “When he first demonstrated his powers, as you called them,” Dr. Dimbali went on, “I was, perforce, stunned. But I quickly recovered and began to develop a series of theories.”

  “That Rose really is a… rose.” It still sounded worse than absurd, when spoken aloud. She blushed.

  “Simplistically put.” He swiped at the SmartBoard, and the image of Rose shrank and moved to one side. An image of an actual rose filled the remainder of the screen. “The two have nothing in common, phenotypically. Rose—our Rose—presents traits of an adolescent human male, androgynous in appearance, but possessed of all human exterior attributes, including fully developed primary sexual characteristics.”

  Deedra thought of the day by the river and blushed deeper red. In the sallow light of the basement, she hoped Dr. Dimbali wouldn’t notice.

  “Externally, he is insignificant. So I had to delve deeper.”

  And then the SmartBoard image rotated, and as she watched, Rose’s skin peeled back to reveal strips of corded muscle and the tracery outlines of blood vessels. She recoiled; the tea sloshed over the brim of the cup and spattered onto the floor.

  “I assure you I was quite humane,” Dr. Dimbali said with a mild note of rebuke. “He volunteered for the experiments, in the name of science. I am no butcher.” He considered. “Then again, Rose is no slab of beef.”

  The reference flew past her. She didn’t know what a slab of beef could possibly be.

  “Rose himself is unaware of his true nature. He’s been… struggling with his sense of identity. He feels he isn’t human, and that makes him wonder what his place in this world is.”

  “And now he knows?” It made a crude sort of sense to her and opened up a new possibility: Maybe Rose had killed Jaron. He’d always been so worried about his own humanity—if he discovered that he wasn’t human, wouldn’t that make it easier to commit murder?

  “He still knows nothing. I finished my analysis only last night. Ironic timing on my part, perhaps, to arrive at the answer at precisely the moment when I cannot explain it to Rose himself.”

  The SmartBoard zoomed in, past the tissues and the vessels. The new image was an interlinked series of balls, connected by pulsating beams of light. Letters ghosted the space near the balls: OH, NH, H, CH, MG…

  “I’ve lectured on plant anatomy and biology at L-Twelve in the past. If you remember any of it, then you no doubt recognize the basic structure of the chlorophyll molecule and its distinctive porphyrin ring.”

  She was surprised to find that she did have some dim memory of it, from one of Dr. Dimbali’s factory-floor pronouncements long ago. Chlorophyll. The molecule central to plant life. It was what made weeds grow.

  “Is this in Rose’s blood?”

  “If only it were that simple.” The molecule doubled and the new copy shifted. They were almost identical, but some of the letters had changed. “This is the heme molecule, building block of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the molecule in our blood that allows us to transmit oxygen through the bloodstream.”

  She squinted at the SmartBoard. The heme and the chlorophyll could have practically been overlaid atop each other and fit precisely. “They look the same.”

  He chuckled. “Indeed. The primary difference is that chlorophyll contains a molecule of magnesium, whereas hemoglobin contains iron.”

  “Which one is Rose’s?”

  Dr. Dimbali grinned—a truly joyous expression that caught her off guard. “My dear, he has both. That’s the whole reason I brought you down here. To explain. He has both.”

  “So he is a rose?”

  “No!” The joy vanished, replaced with the dour expression of resigned frustration she was so used to. “He’s not a rose. He has both types of molecules in his system. And through some process I have yet to discern, they shift from one to the other seemingly at random. His body is a playground between flora and fauna, an impossible blend of two incompatible life-forms, somehow coexisting. Rose is not a rose. Rose is not a human being. He’s both, Ms. Ward. He is, quite literally, a hybrid rose—as far as I know, the first and only specimen in a new breed. He would be… let’s see…” Dr. Dimbali stroked his chin and gazed at the ceiling. “Perhaps take genus from the plant kingdom…” he muttered under his breath, then snapped his fingers and grinned at her. “Rosa sapiens is probably as close as our taxonomy can get. No doubt we’ll need to invent a new one at some point. In any event, he is a bizarre and quite unforeseen combination of human and rose.”

  She sat perfectly still for a long, long time, staring at the images on the SmartBoard until they bled together, as she imagined them blurring in Rose’s body.

  Not human. Not entirely, at least. It was impossible. She closed her eyes as a long, high-pitched whine echoed and pierced her. She was going numb again, as when TI Markard had interrogated her. She was leaving the world.

  Don’t. Don’t do this. Stay here. Stay strong.

  “How can this be possible?” she whispered, and barely heard his response.

  Dr. Dimbali snorted. “I’m sure I have absolutely no idea, young lady. But he is most assuredly a hybrid of the two species. You’ve no doubt witnessed strange mutations yourself: Tooth-weed. The hybrid rats with blue fur. Science tells us this is impossible, but science has told us many things were impossible in the past. In fact, there is even the chance that this is no natural phenomenon, that Rose was actually genetically engineered or modified in some way. We’ve made tremendous strides in such things, as you know every time you eat rations.” He chuckled. “I’ll say this: If he is a genetic recombinant, whoever built him did truly excellent work.

  “Ultimately,” he went on, waving a hand, “there will be an explanation, but for now I care less for the hows and whys and more for the simple whats. What can he do? What can we do with him? You and I excrete nitrogen and phosphorous—he devours them. Needs them, in fact, to live. He can breathe oxygen, as we do, but most often he inhales our carbon dioxide, as though he’s evolved to breathe the toxic brew we call an atmosphere. And he exhales pure oxygen, in such low supply these days. In short: He is the most splendid, absurd thing I have ever witnessed in my life.”

  The whine died away, and her hearing returned to normal.

  “Person, you mean.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You called him a thing. He’s a person.”

  Dr. Dimbali smiled indulgently. “But of course he is, my dear. I was speaking metaphorically.”

  She looked down at the tea. At the leaves floating in it. “These are from him, aren’t they? They came off him. Like a plant.”

  “Rose hips. Not really tea leaves,” Dr. Dimbali admitted. “Harvested from one of his outgrowth appendages. A delicious tea, you’ll agree.”

  No. Not a chance. He’s joking.

  The thought of drinking part of Rose should have seemed grotesque, but she raised the mug to her lips and drank off half its contents. And she knew. Without the slightest room for doubt. She’d held Rose and been held by him. Touched him. Kissed him. This tea was of him.

  Though cold, it was still delicious. Rose’s last gift to her, perhaps. Who was she to forsake it?

  “Loaded with vitamin C,” Dr. Dimbali prattled on. “Much better for absorption than the supplements they hand out or the artificial levels of C impregnated in our usual rations.”

  Could he just shut up for a minute? Or even just a few seconds? Just give her time to absorb not the vitamin C but, rather, the insanity of it all? Because, she realized, the most insane part wasn’t even that Rose was part-boy, part-flower. The most insane part was that it made perfect sense, that as soon as Dr. Dimbali had explained it, she’d felt as though she had remembered it, not learned it, as though Rose’s true nature had been a fact uncovered long ago and then lost in the jumble and fog of memory. It was the only explanation for… for everything. His loitering in the sunlight every morning. His absorbing the water through his fingers. All of it. She’d been drawn to him not because he was a boy and
not because he did not recoil from her scar, but because he was different. Different was actually too small a word for it; there was no word in language for what Rose was. Hybrid, Dr. Dimbali had said. Even that word couldn’t capture it.

  Rose was Rose. Singular and exceptional. In ways Deedra knew she never could be.

  The tea soothed her. It brought her closer to Rose, brought him closer to her. And she didn’t care that everyone thought he’d killed Jaron. She only wanted him back. She wanted to tell him that she understood, at least part of it, and that she didn’t care about the parts she didn’t understand.

  Dr. Dimbali was rambling about hemoglobin and iron and magnesium and photosynthesis, swiping and gesturing at the SmartBoard, causing molecules and atoms to dance. She broke in. “What now?”

  Flustered and more than a bit annoyed at being interrupted, he turned away from the SmartBoard. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “You asked if he’d left me anything. You mentioned the tea. You wanted to know if he left… a piece of himself. Right?”

  With a sigh that seemed to well up from a place deeper even than this basement, Dr. Dimbali nodded sadly and removed his SmartSpex, rubbing his eyes. Without the SmartSpex, he was just a sad, old man, sunken-chested and weathered and conquered. She could not forget the image, even when he replaced the SmartSpex and fixed her with a gaze.

  “Yes. I was hoping he’d left a… clipping.”

  “A clipping?”

  “Perhaps the wrong word. Some part of himself. Hair. Blood. Skin. Anything at all.”

  “You have the…” What was the word? Oh, right. “Rose hips.”

  “They were dried. And they contain only plant matter, without any of the hybrid tissues. All the samples I’ve taken from him are the same—animal or plant, not both. I had samples that contain animal and vegetable tissues working in concert. Blood samples. But they’ve been destroyed in the testing and analysis. I need more of them. As much as possible.”

  “Why?”

  Dr. Dimbali clasped his hands behind his back and stood fully erect, his bearing proud. “Why? Because once upon a time, we lived like human beings, not slaves. Because once upon a time, the world gave forth bounty, not poison.”

  She thought of This Side of Paradise.

  “I’ve seen things. Vids. Some documents. Evidence of a world that existed long, long before the Red Rain. We killed the world, Ms. Ward. We people, with our machines and our technology and our breeding like damn-fool rabbits. We ate everything that grew until nothing more could grow. We vomited toxins into the air and the water until the air and the water became toxins themselves. We spread out across the planet and paved and covered every last bit of ground to house an exploding population. And when the world died, we began feasting on its corpse.

  “But with what exists in Rose’s DNA… with the commingling of molecules in his veins… I believe I can resuscitate our dead planet.” His eyes gleamed behind the SmartSpex, and his posture straightened even more, which she’d thought impossible. “Ms. Ward, I can fix the world.”

  Just as quickly as he’d puffed up, he deflated, crumpling in on himself, hands feeling for the SmartBoard to brace himself. “Or, rather, could. Could have. If they hadn’t taken Rose away.”

  Deedra stared down into her mug again. Little bits floated there. All she had left of him. She thought of the blue rat. Of the poisonous river that divided this Territory from Sendar. She felt Rose’s tendrils wrap around her and lift her into the air, the sudden rush in her chest.

  And she thought of another meal of lab-grown turkey and fruit discs. Thought of days trapped inside when the rain was too toxic to go outside, so acidic it could eat through a poncho or umbrella. Thought of wikis that knew everything but nothing at the same time.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” she said.

  Dr. Dimbali tut-tutted. “There’s nothing to do. There are no options. You were my last hope.”

  Deedra drank the rest of the tea in one shot. It warmed and cooled at the same time. She fixed Dr. Dimbali with a hard look as she stood.

  She said, “We’re going to break Rose out of jail.”

  CHAPTER 29

  They’d taken his coat.

  Rose didn’t have the word for it, but Dr. Dimbali would have known: The coat was made up of his sepals. They grew from the back of his neck, and he naturally shed them as time went on. He had taken them from himself and fashioned them into a coat. The coat was more than a garment—though no longer connected, it was a part of him, and its loss shocked him.

  “You think this is bad?” a guard said. “Just you wait. It gets worse than stripping down.”

  They passed the coat among themselves, curious as to its texture and color. He watched them cut and slash at it with knives and then toss it, ragged, into a corner.

  They crowded around him. Five of them, then six, then ten. Then more. Their mocking voices overlapped in the confines of the jail’s intake room. Combined with the ever-present buzz of the artificial lights and the stale, metallic tang of the processed air, he could barely focus enough to keep his balance.

  In his years-long wander, he’d remained outdoors as much as possible. The excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made others flee indoors, where old air scrubbers did their best to “purify” the air, but the CO2 didn’t bother Rose. And even the tiniest bit of natural sunlight—a rare commodity—did more for him than all the lightbulbs in an entire Territory.

  Now he was penned up inside. Surrounded by DeeCees and local cops, all of whom wanted to be able to say they’d taken a shot at the kid who killed Jaron Ludo. He was shoved from one to the other, hustled back and forth, stumbling from one set of clutching, angry hands to another. Spat on. Tripped to the ground. Hauled back to his feet and hurtled across the room again. They stripped the rest of his clothing from him.

  Would he die there?

  A part of him hoped it would happen soon, if it was to happen. They threw him into a small concrete room, no more than seven feet to a side. There was a single barred window near the ceiling, coated with grime and dust, a metal toilet pocked with blossoms of rust, and an equally run-down metal sink. On a miserable cot, they tossed a messily folded square of cloth. His inmate clothing. Piss yellow and stained with blackish smudges.

  If I die now, he thought, sprawled on the rough, cold floor, it may be for the best.

  He thought of the coat. Thought of new sepals growing from his neck. It would happen soon. What would his captors think of that?

  The mental image of their disbelieving, gasping faces as they espied him in his cell, sepals folding down from the back of his neck, coaxed a weary smile out of him. He struggled to all fours and crawled to the cot. It was only marginally more comfortable than the floor.

  If I die now, I’ll never know. I’ll never know what I am. Who I am. I’ll never know my place in this world.

  He lay naked on the cot and stared at the ceiling. He thought not of the nights he’d lain thus, gazing up at the sweating pipes in Dr. Dimbali’s basement lab, but rather of the single night he’d lain in Deedra’s bed. The netting overhead. The soft weight of her against him.

  Cold and shivering, he groaned as he rolled over. It took him long minutes to creep along the floor to the sink. Thrusting his hand into the running tap, he drank, absorbing the water through his flesh. It was polluted and treated with chemicals, but better than nothing.

  If I die now, I’ll never see her again.

  “So I suppose I’d better not die,” he said aloud.

  He suspected a day had passed.

  The tiny window had darkened, though not completely, never to full dark. It had dimmed, then—after interminable hours—burnished and glowed for what seemed seconds. He’d managed to rouse himself from the cot and scrabble over to the minuscule patch of sunlight that dribbled into his cell. He lay there, absorbing what he could, trying not to think of the mornings waiting for Deedra, sucking up the sunlight as his roots descended into the mineral-poor ear
th, deeper each time, seeking the refugee nutrients buried so far down. Farther down each day.

  The sun was his first clue. The arrival of meals was the other. He’d been thrown into the cell in the early evening, and he counted three meals, confirming his suspicion that a day had passed. The meals were indistinguishable from one another, united in their sludgy color and consistency. The food—like all food—had been conceived in a laboratory somewhere in the Territory, grown under the watchful eye of scientists attempting to mimic dead Nature’s absent bounty.

  It reeked of chemicals, true, but more than that—deeper than that—it reeked of wrong. It reeked of untrue. There were no compatible words to describe fully the assault on his senses, the way the food repulsed him. He couldn’t have eaten the food if he’d wanted to, and he worried that before long he would want to. Instead, he drank the water they gave him. It was no better than what came from the tap, and he feared the toxins within, but he had no choice. If he was going to stay alive, he had to at least have water.

  He spent that first day scrutinizing every last inch of his cell, running his fingers over the rough concrete, stroking the welds on the pipes under the sink and toilet. He tested the heat of the water, its velocity as it spurted or dripped or gushed from the spigot, depending on how he turned the handle. He crawled under the cot, inspecting the bolts that held it in place, the near-rotted straps that held the mattress down, the lumpy, slender insult of padding. The blanket he’d been given was worn almost transparent in places, its ends frayed and gossamer.

  The cell measured ten of his footsteps long by nine deep. There was a discreet plastic bubble high in one dark corner. A camera. They were watching him. The bubble was just out of reach, but he knew he could reach it if he had to.

  For now, though, he had to be careful. Not let them know what he was capable of.

  The door was steel. Its touch sent cold shivers from the pads of his fingers up to his shoulders and around to his spine. It was implacable. A slit at roughly eye level was shut tight from the other side, and another one—where his food had come through—was at waist height. He probed at both and found no way to open them.