The Genocides

by Thomas Michael Disch

  “Drunk? How can that be?” Maryann asked. She did not want to talk, but conversation was the only defense against the voluptuous sounds of the darkness. Talking and listening to Alice talk, she did not have to hear the sighing, the whispers—or wonder which was her husband’s.

  “We’re all drunk, my dears. Drunk on oxygen. Even with this stinking fruit stinking things up, I know an oxygen tent when I smell it.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” Maryann said. It was perfectly true: her cold had reached the stage where she couldn’t even smell the cloying odor of the fruit.

  “I worked in a hospital, didn’t I? So I should know. My dears, we’re all of us higher than kites.”

  “High as the flag on the Fourth of July,” Blossom put in. She didn’t really mind being drunk, if it was like this. Floating. She wanted to sing but sensed that it wasn’t the thing to do. Not now. But the song, once begun, kept on inside her head: I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy.

  “Sssh!” Alice ssshed.

  “Excuse me!” Blossom said, with a wee giggle. Perhaps her song had not after all been altogether inside her head. Then, because she knew it was the correct thing to do when tipsy, she hiccoughed a single, graceful hiccough, fingertips pressed delicately to her lips. Then, indelicately, she burped, for there was gas on her stomach.

  “Are you all right, my dear?” Alice asked, laying a solicitous hand on Maryann’s full womb. “I mean, everything that’s happened—”

  “Yes. There, you see! He just moved.”

  The conversation lapsed, and through the breach the assault was renewed. Now it was an angry, persistent sound, like the buzzing of a honeycomb. Maryann shook her head, but the buzzing wouldn’t stop. “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!”

  “There, there,” Alice soothed.

  “Who do you think is with him?” Maryann blurted.

  “Why, you’re all upset for no reason at all,” Blossom said. “He’s probably with Daddy and Orville this very minute.”

  Blossom’s obvious conviction almost swayed Maryann. It was possible. An hour ago (or less? or more?) Orville had sought out Blossom and explained that he was taking her father (who was naturally very upset) to a more private spot, away from the others. He had found a way into another root, a root that burrowed yet deeper into the earth. Did Blossom want to go there with him? Or perhaps she preferred to stay with the ladies?

  Alice had thought that Blossom would prefer to stay with the ladies for the time being. She would join her father later, if he wished her to.

  Anderson’s departure, and the departure with him of the lamp, had been the cue for all that followed. A month’s danmed energy spilled out and covered, for a little while, the face of sorrow, blotted out the too-clear knowledge of their defeat and of an ignominy the features of which were only just becoming apparent.

  A hand reached out of the darkness and touched Blossom’s thigh. It was Orville’s hand! it could be no other. She took the hand and pressed it to her lips.

  It was not Orville’s hand. She screamed. Instantly, Alice had caught the intruder by the scruff of his neck. He yelped.

  “Neil!” she exclaimed. “For pity’s sake! That’s your sister you’re pawing, you idiot! Now, get! Go look for Greta. Or, on the other hand, maybe you’d better not.”

  “You shut up!” Neil bellowed. “You ain’t my mother!”

  She finally shoved Neil away. Then she laid her head down in Blossom’s lap. “Drunk,” she scolded sleepily. “Absolutely stoned.” Then she began to snore. In a few minutes, Blossom slept too—and dreamed—and woke with a little cry.

  “What is it?” Maryann asked.

  “Nothing, a dream,” Blossom said. “Haven’t you gone to sleep yet?”

  “I can’t.” Though it was as quiet as death now, Maryann was still listening. What she feared most was that Neil would find his wife. And Buddy. Together.

  Buddy woke. It was still dark. It would always be dark now, here. There was a woman beside him, whom he touched, though not to wake her. Assured that she was neither Greta nor Maryann, he gathered his clothes and sidled away. Strands of the sticky pulp caught on his bare back and shoulders and melted there, unpleasantly.

  He was still feeling drunk. Drunk and drained. Orville bad a word for the feeling—what was it?

  Detumescent.

  The grainy liquid trickled down his bare skin, made him shiver. But it wasn’t that he was cold. Though he was cold, come to think of it.

  Crawling forward on hands and knees, he bumbled into another sleeping couple. “Wha?” the woman said. She sounded like Greta. No matter. He crawled elsewhere.

  He found a spot where the pulp had not been disturbed and shoved his body into it backward. Once you got used to the sticky feeling, it was quite comfortable: soft, warm, snuggly.

  He wanted light: sunlight, lamplight, even the red, unsteady light of last night’s burning. Something in the present situation horrified him in a way he did not understand, could not define. It was more than the darkness. He thought about it and as he dropped off to sleep again it came to him:

  Worms.

  They were worms, crawling through an apple.

  TEN

  Falling to Pieces

  “Who’s your favorite movie star, Blossom?” Greta asked.

  “Audrey Hepburn. I only saw her in one movie—when I was nine years old—but she was wonderful in that. Then there weren’t any more movies. Daddy never approved, I guess.”

  “Daddy!” Greta snorted. She tore off a strand of fruit pulp from the space overhead, lowered it lazily into her mouth, mashed it with her tongue against the back of her teeth. Sitting in that pitch-black cavity in the fruit, her listeners could not see her do this, but it was evident from her blurred speech that she was eating again. “And you, Neil? Who’s your favorite?”

  “Charlton Heston. I used to go to anything with him in it.”

  “Me too,” said Clay Kestner. “Him—and how about Marilyn Mon-roe? Any of you fellas old enough to remember old Marilyn Mon-roe?”

  “Marilyn Monroe was vastly overrated in my opinion,” Greta mouthed.

  “What do you say about that, Buddy? Hey, Buddy! Is he still here?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here. I never saw Marilyn Monroe. She was before my time.”

  “Oh, you missed something, kid. You really missed something.”

  “I saw Marilyn Monroe,” Neil put in. “She wasn’t before my time.”

  “And you still say Charlton Heston’s your favorite?” Clay Kestner had a booming, traveling-salesman’s laugh, gutsy and graceless. In former years he had been half-owner of a filling station.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Neil said nervously.

  Greta laughed too, for Clay had begun to tickle her toes. “You’re all wet, all of you,” she said, still giggling but trying to stop. “I still say that Kim Novak is the greatest actress who ever lived.” She had been saying it and saying it for fifteen minutes, and it seemed now that she would say it again.

  Buddy was mortally bored. He had thought it would be better to stay behind with the younger set than to go along on another of his father’s tedious, purposeless explorations through the labyrinthine roots of the Plants. Now that the supplies had been gathered in, now that they had learned everything about the Plant that there was to learn, there was no point in wandering about. And no point in sitting still. He had not realized till now, till there was nothing to do, what a slave to work and Puritan busyness he had become.

  He rose, and his hair (cut short now, like everyone else’s) brushed against the clinging fruit. The fruit pulp, when it dried and matted in one’s hair, was more aggravating than a mosquito bite that couldn’t be itched.

  “Where are you going?” Greta asked, offended that her audience should desert her in the middle of hen analysis of Kim Novak’s peculiar charm.

  “I’ve got to throw up,” Buddy said. “See you all later.”

  It w
as a plausible enough excuse. The fruit, though it nourished them, had minor side effects. They were all, a month later (such was the estimate on which they had agreed), still suffering from diarrhea, gas pains and bellyaches. Buddy almost might have wished he did have to vomit: it would have been something to do.

  Worse than the stomach upsets had been the colds. Nearly everyone had suffered from these too, and there had been no remedy but patience, sleep and a will to recover. In most cases these remedies were sufficient, but three cases of pneumonia had developed, Denny Stromberg among them. Alice Nemerov did what she could do, but as she was the first to confess, she could do nothing.

  Buddy climbed up the rope from the tuber into the root proper. Here he had to walk crouched, for the hollow space in the root was only four and a half feet in diameter. Bit by bit over the last month, the party had moved down many hundreds of feet—to a depth, Orville had estimated, of at least 1,200 feet. Why, the Alworth Building wasn’t that high. Not even the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis! At this depth the temperature was a relaxed seventy degrees.

  There was a rustling sound close ahead. “Who’s that?” Buddy and Maryann asked, almost in unison.

  “What are you doing here?” Buddy asked his wife in a surly tone.

  “Making more rope—but don’t ask me why. It’s just something to do. It keeps me busy. I’ve shredded up some of the vines, and now I’m putting them back together.” She laughed weakly. “The vines were probably stronger than my ropes.”

  “Here, take my hands—show them how to do it.”

  “You!” When Buddy’s hands touched hers, she continued busily knitting so that her fingers would not tremble. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “As you say—it’s something to do.”

  She began to guide his clumsy fingers but grew confused frying to keep in mind that his right hand was in her left and vice versa. “Maybe if I sat behind you…” she suggested. But as it turned out, she couldn’t even close her arms around his chest. Her belly was in the way.

  “How is he?” Buddy asked. “Will it be much longer?”

  “He’s fine. It should be any day now.”

  It worked out as she had hoped: Buddy sat behind her, his thighs clenched about her spread legs, his hairy arms beneath hers, supporting them like the armrests of a chair. “So teach me,” he said.

  He was a slow learner, not used to this kind of work, but his slowness only made him a more interesting pupil. They wore away an hour or more before he was ready to start his own rope. When he had finished it, the fibers fell apart like shreds of tobacco sliding out of a beginner’s cigarette.

  From deep inside the tuber came the music of Greta’s laugh, and then Clay’s bass-drum accompaniment. Buddy had no desire to rejoin them. He had no desire to go anywhere except back to the surface, its fresh air, its radiance, its changing seasons.

  Maryann apparently was having similar thoughts. “Do you suppose it’s Ground Hog’s Day yet?”

  “Oh, I’d say another week. Even if we were up there where we could see whether or not the sun was out, I doubt there’d be any groundhogs left to go looking for their shadows.”

  “Then Blossom’s birthday could be today. We should remind her.”

  “How old is she now? Thirteen?”

  “You’d better not let her hear that. She’s fourteen and very emphatic about it.”

  Another sound came out of the fruit: a woman’s anguished cry. Then a silence, without echoes. Buddy left Maryann on the instant to find out what had caused it. He returned shortly. “It’s Mae Stromberg. Her Denny’s dead. Alice Nemerov’s taking care of her now.”

  “Pneumonia?”

  “That, and he hasn’t been able to hold any food.”

  “Ah, the poor thing.”

  The Plant was very efficient. In fact, as plants go, it couldn’t be beat. It had already proved that. The more you learned about it, the more you had to admire it. If you were the sort to admire such things.

  Consider its roots, for instance. They were hollow. The roots of comparable, Earth-evolved plants (a redwood is roughly comparable) are solid and woody throughout. But what for? The bulk of such roots is functionless; in effect, it is so much dead matter. A root’s only job is to transport water and minerals up to the leaves and, when they’ve been synthesized into food, to carry them back down again. To accomplish this, a root must hold itself rigid enough to withstand the constant pressure of the soil and rock around it. All these things the Plant did excellently well—better, considering its dimensions, than the most efficient of Earth’s own plants.

  The greater open space within the root allowed the passage of more water, more quickly and farther. The tracheids and vessels that conduct water up through an ordinary root do not have a tenth of the capacity of the expansible capillaries that were the cobwebs of the Plant. Similarly, the vines lining the hollow roots could in a single day transport tons of liquid glucose and other materials from the leaves down to the tubers of fruit and the still-growing roots at the lowest levels. These were to the phloem of ordinary plants as an intercontinental pipeline is to a garden hose. The hollow space within the root served a further purpose: it supplied the nethermost regions of the Plant with air. These roots, stretching so far below the airy topsoil, did not have, as other roots would, an independent supply of oxygen. It had to be brought to them. Thus, from the tips of its leaves to the farthest rootcaps, the Plant breathed. It was this multifarious capacity for rapid and large-scale transportation that had accounted for the Plant’s inordinate rate of growth.

  The Plant was economical; it wasted nothing. As its roots sank deeper and thickened, the Plant digested even itself, forming thereby the hollow in which the complex network of capillaries and vines then took shape. The wood that was no longer needed to maintain a rigid exoskeleton was broken down into useful food.

  But the fundamental economy of the Plant, its final excellence, consisted in none of these partial features, but rather in the fact that all Plants were one Plant. As certain insects have, by social organization, achieved that which to their individual members would have been impossible, so the separate Plants, by forming a single, indivisible whole, had heightened their effective power exponentially. Materials that were not available to one might be available to another in superfluity. Water, minerals, air, food—all were shared in the spirit of true communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The resources of an entire continent were at its disposal; it did not want for much.

  The mechanism by which the socialization of the individual Plants took place was very simple. As soon as the first branch roots budded from the vertical primary root, they moved by a sort of mutual tropism toward the kindred branch roots of other Plants. When they met, they merged. When they had merged indissolubly, they diverged, seeking still another union at a deeper level. The many became one.

  You had to admire the Plant. It was really a very beautiful thing, if you looked at it objectively, as, say, Jeremiah Orville looked at it.

  Of course, it had had advantages other plants hadn’t had. It had not had to evolve all by itself. It was also very well cared for.

  Even so, there were pests. But that was being looked after. This was after all, only its first season on Earth.

  By the time Anderson, Orville and the other men (those who’d bothered to come) returned from that day’s exploration deeper into the Plant, Mae Stromberg had already disappeared. So had her son’s corpse. In her last hours with the dying boy, she had not said a word or wept a tear, and when he died there had been only that single maddened outcry. The loss of her husband and daughter she had borne much less calmly; she had felt, perhaps, that she could afford to lose them—could afford, therefore, to grieve for them afterwards. Grieving is a luxury. Now she was left only grief.

  There were twenty-nine people, not counting Mae Stromberg. Anderson called for an assembly right away. Of the twenty-nine, only the two women still down with pneumonia and Alice N
emerov were absent.

  “I am afraid,” Anderson began, after a short prayer, “that we are falling to pieces.” There was some coughing and a shuffle of feet. He waited for it to pass, then continued: “I can’t blame anyone here for Mae’s running off like this. I can’t very well blame Mae either. But those of us who have been spared this last blow and guided here by Divine Providence, those of us, that is to say…”

  He stopped, irretrievably tangled in his own words—something that had been happening to him increasingly of late. He pressed a hand to his forehead and drew a deep breath.

  “What I mean to say is this: We can’t just lay around eating milk and honey. There is work to be done. We must strengthen ourselves for the trials ahead, and…. And, that is to say, we must not let ourselves go soft.

  “Today I have gone down lower into these infernal tunnels, and I found out that the fruit down there is better. Smaller and firmer—there’s less of this sugar candy. I also found that there’s less of this oxygen, which has been… I mean to say that up here we’re turning into a bunch of—what was that word?”

  “Lotus-eaters,” Orville said.

  “A bunch of lotus-eaters. Exactly. Now this must stop—” He struck his palm with his clenched fist in emphasis.

  Greta, who had had her hand up during the latter half of this speech, at last spoke up without waiting for recognition. “May I ask a question?”

  “What is it, Greta?”

  “What work? I just don’t see what it is that we’ve been neglecting.”

  “Well, we haven’t been doing any work, girl. That’s plain to see.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Anderson was aghast at this effrontery—and from her. Two months ago he could have had her stoned as an adultress—and now the harlot was vaunting her pride and rebellion for everyone to see.