by Liz Grzyb
“Just as well there were only three of them, eh,” Ted says. “Might’ve given you a run for your money if there’d been more.”
“Just as well help arrived when it did.” Mautake gives a nod as Jess reaches them.
She shakes off her human crutch, sways, but keeps her feet. “The pond environment reported it had gone unstable. Gave security a shout when we saw what was happening. You were doing pretty well, but me and Deb thought we should even the odds.”
Mautake nods his thanks again and another jolt of pain spears out of his arm; he leans forward against the nausea. A medic scans him, makes his head hurt with pokes of a gloved finger. “Take it easy, champ,” the medic says.
A security man tells Ted, “We traced the hacker. Fried the little bastard. Facial recog has ID’d this three: local drongos with a two-year-old visitors’ map.”
“So much for the digital era,” Ted says with a laugh.
“What was in that drone?” Mautake asks.
“Medusa gas. Developed from snake venom, they reckon. First time we’ve had to use it out here.”
“Never heard of such a thing.”
“Not many have. That’s the point.”
Mautake squirms as the medic touches his injured arm. “I thought they had the drones locked down or something.” His voice slurs and he grips the pond rim with his good hand in case he starts to slide off.
“Flew it on manual,” Ted says. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Wombat. A short exposure to the gas won’t cause any long-term harm.” He claps a hand on Mautake’s good shoulder, apologises as Mautake grimaces with the vibration. “Pretty gutsy, facing them down like that.”
“My name is Mautake.”
The medic interrupts: “He needs treatment. Lucky he wasn’t killed by that blow to the head. Arm’s fractured, too.”
“You done good . . . Mautake.” Ted’s voice comes from far away. “We’ll have a beer once the doc says it’s okay.”
Someone mentions infirmary, and he is lifted by strong hands, not sure if his assertion he can stand up by himself made it to his lips.
“Good job, mate,” Jess says as he’s levered onto a trolley and strapped in. A hypo presses against his skin, fires a shot of compressed air and painkiller into his cold flesh.
He smells earth and water, a hint of frangipani, and thanks God he’s alive. Today, at least, this feels like home.
* * ** * ** * *
The Mangrove Maker
Thomas Benjamin Guerney
On the horizon the arcology rose against the sun like the blade of a colossal sundial. Its shadow fell over the hills and the forest and the bay, over the grey dieback zone, and ended just short of Donna’s mangroves. She pushed through their waxy leaves and hoisted herself over arching roots. The mud sucked at her gumboots. She twisted off a leaf and touched it to her tongue; it was salty, but not quite salty enough, so she made a note in her wrist terminal to amplify the excretion glands when she returned to her cottage.
She ducked under the last branches of her synthetics and out into the dieback zone, shielding her eyes from the sun. The mangroves here in the spreading stain of blight were brittle, bare, the colour of bone. She squelched into the desolation a few metres and found a lemon-yellow fiddler crab squatting despondently in the mud. She nudged it with her boot and sent it scuttling towards the cover of her synthetics, and she lodged her prototype seed in its place. She took off a glove, activated the germination sequence, and stepped back to watch.
Donna held her breath.
The seed beeped three times and split down the middle. It hissed like water dropped on a hotplate. Tendrils rose out into the sun and coiled together to form a single stem, which lengthened and grew two pale leaves at its tip. The stem split in two, then four, and more leaves grew along the new branches in Fibonacci spirals. The main stem firmed into a trunk, the seed rocked as roots drilled down into the mud, and the air became bitter.
It smelt like burning.
“Shit,” said Donna.
The seed beeped again, this time the trill of an error. The trunk drooped like plastic over a flame. Leaves shrivelled and fell to the mud in black flakes. The tree curled in on itself, released a low hiss, and was still.
Donna swore into her scarf and stamped her boot in the mud. She gathered the charred remains of her prototype and pushed back through the waxy branches of her older models. She forded the estuary, climbed the bank to her cottage, and in the dome of her workshop she downloaded the parameters from the seed and analysed them.
Everything had run perfectly except for a single regulator pushed past capacity. In her supplier’s catalogue she couldn’t find a more advanced regulator, so she called them.
“I’m sorry, we no longer stock accelerated photosynthesis components.” The sales rep’s face stretched and warped on the curved wall as Donna’s wrist terminal calibrated its projection. “Due to low demand they’ve been moved to our bespoke catalogue and need to be custom ordered.”
A schematic of the advanced regulator rotated in the corner of the projection. It was tagged with a price so high it made Donna squint with derision. “That’s crazy,” she said. “I can’t pay that. Can’t you put it on my account?”
“It’s company policy that made-to-order items are paid upfront.” The sales rep shrugged. “Sorry about that.”
Out of the workshop window the arcology was a black column against the hills. Donna wondered exactly where in that vertical kilometre of concrete the sales rep was sitting and so casually ruining her life’s work.
“Can I help you with anything else today?” asked the rep.
“Wait.” said Donna. “I can pay. Just wait.”
She found the credit chip in the rear dome of her cottage, deep in a cupboard, under a pile of moth-eaten shirts, in a jewellery box filled with things she never wore anymore. Two names were embossed on the aluminium: Donna C Kloet, and above that, Andrew M Llywelyn. She recast the projection of the sales rep on the back of the cupboard door, and held up the cold metal of the credit chip.
She hesitated, keeping the chip back from the terminal’s scanner. If the chip didn’t work, if it was deactivated—and by all rights it should have been—then her project would fail. The mangroves would die quicker than she could replace them with her standard synthetics. Unprotected, the seagrass meadows and coral would die off, fish and crustaceans would lose their breeding grounds, turtles and dugongs would starve. The dead roots would rot and the sediments would wash away, leaving nothing but salt.
But if the chip was active then it was certainly a trap.
Donna bit her lip and scanned the chip. A green light confirmed the transaction. The sales rep thanked her, promised a swift delivery, and blinked out.
In the cutting cold of her garden Donna wrapped her arms around herself and stared out to the arcology. Regret was already tightening in her chest. She resolutely ignored it. The delivery drone glinted as it banked over the bay, and within two slow breaths its thrumming engines carried it over the dieback zone. Donna’s synthetics thrashed underneath it, waves rolled on the estuary, and it made a neat landing beside her polytunnel.
She unpacked the regulator in her workshop and collected everything she needed for the next prototype: biomass siphons, nutrient converters, assorted components in old ice cream containers, leaf buds on strings of cellulose wires like fairy lights. But, as she tried to focus on her work, the image of the names embossed on the credit chip kept glinting in her thoughts.
When the door rattled with three firm knocks, she jolted up from her stool and her screwdriver flew from her hand into a rack of microplates.
It had only taken him an hour.
She opened the door to find her ex in the pale sun with his hands deep in his parka pockets. He stood by the garden he had helped dig, by the white domes of the cottage he had helped design. The familiarity of it shocked her into memories of numb and companionable routines, and she hated the urge to crawl back into them. It
took her a moment of mute staring before she gathered the words she’d been muttering to herself in rehearsal for half an hour.
“Hello Andrew,” she said as cheerily as she could. “I’m a bit busy at the moment, do you mind dropping by another time?”
“Nice to see you too, Donna.” He screwed up his face against the wind and put the back of his hand to his nose. “You know, I’d forgotten that rotten smell. If your mangroves are synthetic, why not make them sweeter?”
“Because then they wouldn’t be mangroves,” said Donna. “I’m sorry, but I really am very busy.”
“You just charged a substantial sum to my account. You would think I’d at least get invited in out of the cold.”
A horrible thought struck Donna. “You didn’t cancel the transaction, did you?”
Andrew shook his head, and in her relief she stepped back from the door to allow him inside.
“If you needed help I don’t know why you didn’t just call.” He unzipped his parka in the warmth and took in the workshop with a slow gaze. “And this is what it was for? Still more mangroves?”
She didn’t like his eyes on her half-finished designs, her various projects started in earnest but ended in failure. Her skin prickled as if the circuits of leaf buds coiled over the walls were an extension of her own body, as if she stood naked before him.
“Let’s talk in the kitchen.” She forced a smile. “With a cuppa.”
Andrew held the door open for her and stood aside, as if this were his house and she his guest.
“After you,” she said, and locked the door behind her.
In the kitchen dome, Donna picked a few leaves of lemon verbena from the aquaponics system and threw them in a pot. Andrew hung his parka on the same hook as he always had and leaned against the bench in the pale light from the window. He slid his hands out to either side along the bench and took up half the room.
“If the problem is money,” he said, “I can always get you your job back at ArcoGen. Everybody there remembers how brilliant you are. When we were all together I often thought of you as our very own Beatrice, you know, leading us into Dante’s paradise.” He looked out at the estuary bank. “If you ever wanted to . . . progress, of course.”
She poured boiling water into the pot and realised she’d forgotten whether he actually liked lemon verbena tea or not. She smiled in the aromatic steam. That was progress.
“I’ll be fine for money once I get the new prototype working,” she said. “I have to fix the problem of the roots. They’re the root of the problem, you see.” She gave a loud guffaw and slapped the bench. Her joke left Andrew unmoved, so she leant towards him with her mouth fixed open in a manic frozen laugh, and slowly said, “The problem of the roots is the root of the problem,” until she elicited a twitch from the corner of his mouth. It could have been either mirth or irritation.
“Anyway,” she said, “My older models need to be constructed individually with the roots in-soil, which takes too long, and the new accelerated self-propagating model is having some teething issues. I’ve cracked it now, though, I’m pretty sure. Just today. The dieback zone will become green again, the marine ecosystem will flourish, and each plant will provide ten thousand kilowatt hours. Pretty good, hey?”
Andrew drew a bottle of wine from the rack and hefted it in his hand. “The new ArcoGen Catalyser is no bigger than this pinot,” he said, “and it powers the entire arcology. Half a million people.” He twisted the cap open. “And it can—”
“I was saving that, you know.” She was saving it for any odd afternoon she felt like a drink, but she was still saving it.
Andrew bit his lip. He never liked being interrupted. “I’ll buy you a case,” he said.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”
He took two wine glasses, placed them on the bench and filled one from the bottle. “That’s how much catalytic fluid it takes to provide electricity for those half-million.” He filled the second glass. “And there’s still plenty to spare for a whole second arcology. Can you imagine the possibilities? It’s the most important innovation this century, and you can be part of it again.” He pushed the second glass towards her.
“I’m happy with tea,” she said.
“Why are you being so antagonistic?”
Donna laughed. “I just feel like tea.”
But she did want him to crack, she realised. His whole measured and reasonable act was doing her head in, and outright hostility would at least be honest. But his eyes just fell to his glass and rested there for a few silent moments. Then he smiled as if he saw something heart-warming in the wine.
“Remember the day I hired the Bentley speeder and we vineyard-hopped through the Hunter Valley?”
Donna nodded as she filled her cup from the pot. That was indeed one of the more pleasant outings in the months leading to their break-up. Interesting he didn’t choose to bring up their later trip to a cidery when she got pleasantly drunk and wandered off to breathe the sweet, fresh air down the rows of apple trees. After about twenty minutes Andrew, red-faced and heaving for breath, had found her and screamed at her the whole way home for “disappearing” and making him worry so much. The next morning she had discovered tracking software hidden in her wrist terminal.
“Mm,” she said. “Classic times. A memorable lark.”
Andrew swirled his wine and watched the legs streak down the side of the glass. “You know, I could have simply cancelled the transaction, but I thought I’d do you the courtesy of coming around here and giving you the chance to explain yourself.”
“I’m happy to explain myself. It was utterly humiliating to take your money without asking, but it was a spur of the moment decision and if there was any other option I would have gone with it. However, my project is more important than my ego.”
He sighed. “Your fake trees?”
“I assume you mean my artificial mangroves that simultaneously provide shelter for vulnerable ecosystems and stop coastal erosion while providing clean energy in the form of concentrated resinous biofuel?”
“They may be pretty,” said Andrew, “but they’re inefficient.”
“Both good reasons to like them.”
“Why don’t you leave biology to the biologists?”
“The mangroves are dying despite the efforts of biologists,” said Donna. “Engineers have to step in.”
“The arcology does everything the trees do.”
“Concrete embankments and aquariums are hardly the same,” she said.
“The mangroves are a folly,” he said.
“Six years with you was a fucking folly.”
And there it was, the words had boiled out of her. Even though his very act of showing up at her cottage instead of just messaging or calling was an act of hostility she could barely tolerate, she’d been the first to express her feelings in words, and somehow that felt like losing.
He turned bodily away from her. He lifted his wine towards his lips, stopped halfway, shook his head like it was all too much, and placed down the glass. In a sudden rush he took his parka from the hook and walked away down the hall.
“Andrew,” said Donna. His footsteps retreated. “Andrew.” She grabbed his wine glass, hers as well, and strode after him. “Andrew,” she called again. Despite everything, despite the fact he deserved it, she felt sorry for what she’d said.
He reached the conservatory before turning back to her. He stood amongst the grape vines and synthetic saplings, under the glass panels filtering the milky sun. She pushed his glass into his hand.
“Honestly, Donna, it’s fine,” he said. “You can keep the money, you don’t need to worry about that. I just . . . well, I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry I said that thing.” She took a gulp of wine. It turned out she did feel like it. The alcohol was a pleasant burn in her throat, a warmth in her cheeks, a steadying hand on her nerves. She took another, bigger gulp.
“I know your mind, Donna. You’ll stick with your mangroves because y
ou always finish what you start, and I respect that, I truly do. Your commitment to your work is admirable. I love the way you want to make it all beautiful, the way you turn into science what others would dismiss as whimsy. But beauty, you know, as Socrates said, is a short-lived tyranny.”
“Good thing we’re in a platonic relationship.” She gave him another one of those manic frozen laughs.
This one didn’t even get a twitch. Andrew only squeezed the bridge of his nose, and when his hand came away his mouth was slack and damp with an open-mouthed frown. He reminded Donna of a mudskipper gasping for air. With a dismissive wave, he sat awkwardly on the edge of a bed of mustard greens.
“Oh, Donna.” He sighed, really putting his shoulders into it. “To be perfectly honest, I need your help. Even just a small concession, you know, just coming to a meeting with the ArcoGen team, just discussing how you might contribute. No pressure, all informal. Even that would be so much help.”
Donna took another sip of wine, taking her time with it to hide her face behind the glass. She suspected her expression of showing sympathy, or maybe pity, and she didn’t want him to see either. The wine smelt of blackberry and smoke.
“No. Sorry, no,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine.” He blinked up at the glass panels in the dome. “But it might be wise. You won’t get too much light in here once construction is underway.”
The conservatory generator hummed and ticked.
“Construction of what?” asked Donna.
“The approved site for the second arcology is just north of here. There’ll be a lot of dust and noise too. It won’t be pleasant. Not at all.”
Donna was silent. Andrew’s eyes searched her face.
“But the dieback zone is just north of here,” she said.
