“It tried to sweet-talk us,” Joe said.
“Aye, they do that,” said Arthur, nodding emphatically. “Read somewhere they’re the ones as think we aren’t fully human. Tools an’ clothes and farmyard machines, like? Sustaining a pre-post-industrial lifestyle instead of updating our genome and living off the land like God intended?”
“ ’Ow the hell can something with nine legs and eye stalks call itself human?” Joe demanded, chugging back half his pint in one angry swallow.
“It used to be, once. Maybe used to be a bunch of people.” Wendy got a weird and witchy look in her eye. “ ’Ad a boyfriend back thirty, forty years ago, joined a Lamarckian clade. Swapping genes an’ all, the way you or me’d swap us underwear. Used to be a ’viromentalist back when antiglobalization was about big corporations pissing on us all for profits. Got into gene hackery and self-sufficiency big time. I slung his fucking ass when he turned green and started photosynthesizing.”
“Bastards,” Joe muttered. It was deep green folk like that who’d killed off the agricultural-industrial complex in the early years of the century, turning large portions of the countryside into ecologically devastated wilderness gone to rack and ruin. Bad enough that they’d set millions of countryfolk out of work—but that they’d gone on to turn green, grow extra limbs and emigrate to Jupiter orbit was adding insult to injury. And having a good time in the process, by all accounts. “Din’t you ’ave a farm problem, coupla years back?”
“Aye, did that,” said Art. He clutched his pint mug protectively.
“It went away,” Joe mused aloud.
“Yeah, well.” Wendy stared at him cautiously.
“No fireworks, like.” Joe caught her eye. “And no body. Huh.”
“Metabolism,” said Wendy, apparently coming to some kind of decision. “That’s where it’s at.”
“Meat—” Joe, no biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to ’splain the jargon ’fore using it.”
“You ever wondered how those farms get to Jupiter?” Wendy probed.
“Well.” Joe shook his head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they est-ee-vate and you are fucked if they do it next door ’cause when those trees go up they toast about a hundred hectares?”
“Very good,” Wendy said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s you and me take a hike.”
Pausing at the bar for Ole Brenda to refill her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy Buerke—throwback in green wellingtons and Barbour jacket—and her latest femme, out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered waste-ground out back behind the pub. It was dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-size red cloud of orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.
“No, why?”
She pulled out a fist-size box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis bugs.”
“Isn’t that a—?”
“Ask me no questions, an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.
“Uh-huh.” Joe took a deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two or three meters would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling subsentient coppers whose job it was to prevent conspiracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was a relic of the Internet Age, when enthusiastic legislators had accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal—not realizing that in another few decades ‘network terminals’ would be self-replicating ’bots the size of fleas and about as common as dirt. (The Net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay. Tell me about metal, meta—”
“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking toward the field behind the pub. “And stage trees. Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die, in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die, they nitrate the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked ’zymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead, it’s like ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and some of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about efficient as ’at old-time Ariane or Atlas rocket. Not very, but enough.”
“Uh.” Joe blinked. “That meant to mean something to me?”
“Oh ’eck, Joe.” Wendy shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it wasn’t?”
“Okay.” He nodded, seriously. “What can I do?”
“Well.” Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow transfer to Jupiter.
“Well?” He waited expectantly.
“You’re wondering where all that fertilizer’s from,” Wendy said elliptically.
“Fertilizer.” His mind blanked for a moment.
“Nitrates.”
He glanced down, saw her grinning at him. Her perfect fifth set of teeth glowed alarmingly in the greenish overspill from the light on her jammer box.
“Tha’ knows it make sense,” she added, then cut the jammer.
• • • •
When Joe finally staggered home in the small hours, a thin plume of smoke was rising from Bob’s kennel. Joe paused in front of the kitchen door and sniffed anxiously, then relaxed. Letting go of the door handle, he walked over to the kennel and sat down outside. Bob was most particular about his den—even his own humans didn’t go in there without an invitation. So Joe waited.
A moment later there was an interrogative cough from inside. A dark, pointed snout came out, dribbling smoke from its nostrils like a particularly vulpine dragon. “Rrrrrrr?”
“ ’S’me.”
“Uuurgh.” A metallic click. “Smoke good smoke joke cough tickle funny arf arf?”
“Yeah, don’t mind if I do.”
The snout pulled back into the kennel; a moment later it reappeared, teeth clutching a length of hose with a mouthpiece on one end. Joe accepted it graciously, wiped off the mouthpiece, leaned against the side of the kennel, and inhaled. The weed was potent and smooth: within a few seconds the uneasy dialogue in his head was still.
“Wow, tha’s a good turnup.”
“Arf-arf-ayup.”
Joe felt himself relaxing. Maddie would be upstairs, snoring quietly in their decrepit bed: waiting for him, maybe. But sometimes a man just had to be alone with his dog and a good joint, doing man-and-dog stuff. Maddie understood this and left him his space. Still . . .
“ ’At farm been buggering around the pond?”
“Growl exclaim fuck-fuck yup! Sheep-shagger.”
“If it’s been at our lambs—”
“Nawwwwrr. Buggrit.”
“So whassup?”
“Grrrr, Maddie yap-yap farmtalk! Sheep-shagger.”
“Maddie’s been talking to it?”
“Grrr yes-yes!”
“Oh, shit. Do you remember when she did her last backup?”
The dog coughed fragrant blue smoke. “Tank thump-thump full cow moo beef clone.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah, I think so, too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case.”
“Yurrrrrp.” But while Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine eructation a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went inside.
• • • •
The next morning, over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost meditative.
“Bob said you’d been talking to that farm,” Joe commented over his eggs.
“Bob—” Maddie’s expression was unreadable. “Bloody dog.” She lifted the Rayburn’s hot plate lid and peered at the toast browning underneath. “Talks too much.”
“Did you?”
“Ayup.” She turned the toast and put the lid back down on it.
“Said much?”
“It’s a farm.” She looked out the window. “Not a fuckin’ worry in the world ’cept making its launch window for Jupiter.”
“It—”
“Him. Her. They.” Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. “It’s a collective. Usedta be six people. Old, young, whatever, they’s decided ter go to Jupiter. One of ’em was telling me how it happened. How she’d been living like an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous breakdown. Wanted out. Self-sufficiency.” For a moment her expression turned bleak. “Felt herself growing older but not bigger, if you follow.”
“So how’s turning into a bioborg an improvement?” Joe grunted, forking up the last of his scrambled eggs.
“They’re still separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive anything, never being on your own, not bein’ trapped—” Maddie sniffed. “Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”
Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.
“Bugger,” she remarked.
“You feel trapped?” Joe asked. Again? He wondered.
Maddie grunted evasively. “Not your fault, love. Just life.”
“Life.” Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. “Life!”
“Horizon’s closing in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of horizons.”
“Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. “Got a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”
• • • •
In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surreptitiously EMPing every police ’bot on the farm into the silicon afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it ran up the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.
Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign. Joe kept his questions to himself.
It took another five days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice to begin fueling up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-Net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat. He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything—just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to holing up.
Finally, the tank was filled. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.
The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental control cameras.
That had been long ago. Today the woods really were wild. No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poking from the treacherous surface of a fossil mud bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.
Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots and fuzzy black grasslike stuff covered the ground densely around them. Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless smoking liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him uneasy. As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he’d been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill the trees stone dead without igniting them. After all, they had cores that were basically made of gun cotton—highly explosive, liable to go off if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chainsaw. The tree he’d hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of a distraught farm.
“My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!” Eye stalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!”
“Back off,” said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter and fumbling for his air gun.
The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. “How dare you?” demanded the farm. “My treasured seedlings!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the fuck away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm’s back.
“My crop,” it moaned quietly. “My exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for Baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this? Rat Lady?” It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.
So Joe shot it.
Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyzes skeletal muscles, the kind over which human nervous systems typically exert conscious control. Etorphine is an insanely strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a blue whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time.
It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a Syrette raised. “Why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone together!”
“I was going to ask you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh, Joe, if only—”
“Joe? Maddie?” he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquilizer gun.
A mouth appeared in the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree, he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.
“Bugger,” said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head. “Bugger.” He keyed his walkie-talkie: “Bob, come in, Bob!”
“Rrrrowl?”
“Momma’s had another break-down. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”
“Yap!”
“Okay. I got ’er backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get t’ tank warmed up for ’er an’ then shift t’ tractor down ’ere to muck out this mess.”
• • • •
That autumn, the weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI Born in Colorado, where he lives today, Paolo Bacigalupi began selling SF in 1999. By the end of the decade he had firmly established himself as one of the most important authors in the genre. His 2009 novel The Windup Girl won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and was included by Time on their list of the ten best books of that year. His YA science fiction novel Ship Breaker, published the following year, won the Michael L. Printz Award for best YA novel and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Most of his work is set in near- to middle-distance futures that are struggling with the consequences of drastic climate change and the end of Western global dominance.
21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century Page 6
