Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  * * *

  PRELUDE

  To the Eldest and her sisters, the glass that protected their narrow gallery from sky and weather was as plain to “see” as the dark walls that shielded them from public view. Their senses were not quite of the human kind, and it was not difficult for them to register the infrared that glowed from both sorts of solid surface. Yet they could also respond to visible wavelengths, and thus they could watch both the swayings of the overhanging palm fronds and citrus branches that tempered the bright sunlight and the movements of tree limbs and clouds and sun beyond the glass.

  They could also feel. They could feel temperature and dry and wet, and if they could, they would have smiled when the pipes that arched between their shade plants and the glass spewed misting showers to keep the dryness from their leaves and blossoms and the rich soil that embraced their bulbs.

  The Eldest and her sisters could hear as well, but they could not speak. They could not, in fact, communicate in any ways that humans would easily have understood. They talked to each other by the slight bendings of their stems, the curlings of their leaves, and mainly by the drifts of fragrance that rode the steady current of air that flowed from the Eldest down the gallery past all the rest. In due time, when the air had swept through all the other passages of their dwelling, those odors would return. But they would be diluted then, spread out and weakened, and of course delayed. The Eldest thus spoke always with the first and loudest voice, and no sister could threaten her dominance. So long as no one rearranged the gallery or tampered with the ventilation system, so the situation would remain. And so long as the Eldest gave no orders for change, their ordered rank and the air currents that swept their messages along the gallery would be undisturbed. She would, of course, order no disturbance of the status quo, for much of her heredity dictated a properly hierarchical sense of her own importance in the larger scheme of things.

  Now the Eldest let a long leaf curl and straighten while she twisted on her stem to peer down the gallery and be sure she had the attention of her sisters. She might have sighed if she had had lungs. Those sisters…She was the Eldest by only a little. All had had time to reach their full growth. But only she had reached a size consistent with maturity. The others were small and stunted. Some were deformed in minor, inconsequential ways. And the next generation would have to be worse. Certainly it could be no better. Unless…

  Finally, she released a small puff of intricately intermingled odors. Her message was simple, and each member of her retinue added to it comments, so that what the listener furthest downdrift sensed was something rather like:

  “WE ARE HANDICAPPED

  Cannot leave our beds

  Destiny and progeny demand

  No handicap

  Motility

  THINK

  Consider

  OUR MASTER/PET

  Has/had pistil/mate

  And scion/seedling/sprout

  THAT ONE TOO HAS

  Yes, pistil/mate

  Let’s bring!

  Them here!

  YES

  To us

  To study them

  And cherish them

  To change

  If possible

  To make them make

  Pollen

  We crave it!

  Yes, fruition

  And predestined

  Success

  IF POSSIBLE

  Will these three be enough?

  TELL, THEN, MASTER/PET

  To get more as well

  As rootstocks

  And pistils

  For our dreams”

  The conversation was not hasty, for the speakers were languid beings, unrushed and patient. But by the time the sun had dipped near the hills and the light had begun to dim, the issue was settled. The Eldest and her sisters spread their leaves and turned their faces toward the last of the light. There was nothing more to say, and only a little to do, a little that could easily await another sunny day, when energy waxed and opportunity arose. Tomorrow the Eldest would issue the necessary orders.

  Until then, she and her sisters would spend their time in dreams, dreams of some distant day when their scions/seedlings/sprouts might stalk the world beyond the walls that enclosed their gallery, when more active beings would cease their scurryings and bow before them, when…

  Darkness fell, but before the dreams grew still and dim, the Eldest sent out the call. Moments later, a hand fell upon the switch near the gallery entrance and artificial lights came on. They were dim but bright enough to sustain consciousness, intent, and dreams even when the world was lost in blackness.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  “Do you have the new Slugabeds?”

  “Of course we do, Ma’am.” Tom Cross smiled at the customer and tugged surreptitiously at the side of his light green coverall. She was old enough to be his mother, and her paisley coverall was both three years behind the fashion and a hair too tight. Yet she was stylish enough in other ways; she wore no rings or earrings, and the chain around her neck was blackened aluminum, its pendant a classic pewter peace sign, both as current as could be. She must, he thought, hate to admit that she was losing her struggle to keep the figure of her youth. “Right this way, please.”

  She babbled, as customers tend to do: “We have an antique waterbed, you know. And it doesn’t leak. But I saw the ad, and I thought how interesting it would be. Almost like having a pet. And it wouldn’t have to be plugged in.”

  Tom didn’t know she had a waterbed, antique or new. He didn’t care whether she had seen an ad, or how interesting she thought a Slugabed might be. It was enough that she had chosen to visit Mr. Greengenes’ Appliance Garden. And that he had a chance to earn a commission. Someday, perhaps, he would have a Garden of his own. For now…

  He gestured at the potted plants they were passing. “Then you don’t have any bioppliances? Our hanky bush is quite useful. And the bathroom model is very productive.”

  “Oh, we have one of those. But it doesn’t do much, you know?”

  “Neither does a Slugabed. It just lies there.”

  “But it’s warm! And it wiggles. That’s what the ad said.”

  The young man nodded. “If you wish. It’ll massage you, or cuddle you, or…” He shrugged. “And yes, it keeps itself—and you—at body temperature. It’ll warm you or cool you, depending on the weather.”

  The Slugabed display was around the next corner, just past the goldfish bushes. “These are more active,” he said. “Just drop the flowers in a bowl of water, and…”

  “My sister has two.”

  He sighed as quietly as he could, hoping she would not notice, and led her onward. “There,” he said. “We have a good selection.” The Slugabeds, looking like unrolled sleeping bags, were arrayed on a carpeted platform, without frames or headboards or box springs. They came in all sizes—crib, youth, twin, queen, king—and in as many shades of skin as one could see on a city street. A few were even piebald.

  The customer leaned over to pat a light tan Slugabed. Over her shoulder blades, Tom could now see, her coverall had been embroidered with small wings. His own coverall bore no decorations other than the darker green figures woven into the fabric. “They’re not very thick, are they?” she asked.

  “They don’t have to be. Try one, and you’ll see.”

  She looked skeptical. “And the surface. I expected…”

  “Something slimy?” When she stiffened, he thought that of course that was precisely what she had half expected, in the back of her mind, even as she craved to rest on the leading edge of fashion. He added, “Well, the basic genome did come from a slug. But then they added the genes for a real skin. And warm blood.”

  “It feels just like human skin, without the hai
r.” She giggled at a thought. “Or the stubble.”

  “I believe it’s a modified pigskin. Very smooth, very soft.”

  She lay down. The Slugabed twisted under her, fitting itself to the contours of her body. It did not wrap around her, but rather cupped and cradled her as if she lay in the palm of some giant lover’s hand. It made Tom think of Muffy Bowen. They weren’t married, but they lived together, and she would be at home now, looking forward to his return. He wished that he were there now, and that he could afford a Slugabed for their bedroom, and that…He sighed, more loudly this time.

  It was not the customer’s body that made him think of Muffy, but the way the Slugabed embraced her, and the way the ripples ran through the bioppliance’s substance, and the way she responded. Her nipples had erected quite visibly.

  The Slugabed’s skin, he knew, was as soft and smooth as that of a baby’s butt. He had lain down on one when they first arrived and been depressed for a week. He wanted a child; Muffy didn’t; that was the greatest flaw in their relationship.

  “Ooh!” the customer said. “I see what you mean. What do you feed it?”

  “It absorbs your sweat and body oil and skin flakes. If that’s not enough…” Tom Cross pointed to a patch of skin near her head. It was slightly lighter in color than the rest of the Slugabed. “This spot turns bright pink, and you pour some milk on the bed, or gravy, or…” He shrugged. “Instructions come with it.”

  He pointed to a small bump on the skin beside the hunger patch. “That’s the control node. Try squeezing it.” When she obeyed, the Slugabed fell away from her body and lay flat, quiet and passive, a mere mattress.

  “Oh!” she said. She squeezed the node again, and the genimal once more molded itself to her.

  “If you squeeze harder,” said Tom, “it’ll massage you.”

  “Can you squeeze too hard?”

  “The instructions warn against trying. It tries to scale its response to your command, and…”

  She was ignoring his answer. She forced the living mattress flat with her hands, rolled on it, patted it, stroked it. “They don’t come with fur, do they?” He shook his head, thinking to himself that fur would make feeding a messy business. She rolled over again and pressed her face into the Slugabed’s surface. Then, finally, she sat up and said, “I think I’ll take it. You do deliver?”

  The Slugabed display was near the back of the store. After Tom Cross had written up the sale and arranged for delivery, he fetched a basket of apples and a bottle of nutrient spray from the nearby supply room. He was a salesman, but among his duties he also counted the chore of feeding the inventory.

  The spray was for the Slugabeds, and it took him only minutes to distribute their rations. The apples were for the garbage disposals that sat in a row near the wall, held erect by U-shaped brackets. Each of the gengineered pigs had a barrel-shaped body, stubby, nearly vestigial limbs, and a blunt snout that pointed toward the ceiling. Once it was installed in a customer’s kitchen, the drainpipe from the sink would empty into its mouth and throat. It would then chew up whatever chunks the owner chose to putdown the drain, extracting nutrient as necessary. The residues—solid and liquid—would pass through the genimal and into a second pipe. Here, in the Garden, the garbage disposals were connected only to the outlet pipes, short stubs that jutted upward from a larger pipe that ran beneath their row. Water ran continuously through this pipe. Odor was limited to the animal fragrance of the genimals’ bodies.

  Tom stuffed an apple into each pig’s mouth. When the grinding noises had quieted, he gave the larger models a second helping. Then, the basket still in his hands, he made his rounds of the store, gathering overripe pie plant and sammitch bush fruits, withered goldfish blooms, yellowed leaves, and other organic garbage. He could feed it all to the pigs, he knew, and sometimes he did. But the Garden also stocked litterbugs. They were street and yard cleaners, designed to process huge quantities of dung and other litter, and all he had to do was dump the basket’s contents before them. Their shovel jaws made short work of his gleanings. When they were done, he scattered walnut-sized feed pellets on the floor of their pen. The store simply didn’t generate enough litter to satisfy their needs.

  Tom’s boss was a Ukrainian immigrant who liked to brag of his prosperity. Looking sadly down at his flat belly, he would shake his head slowly back and forth and say, “My grandmother would be ashamed of me. In her day, a successful merchant would be fat!” But not him. He had, he would add, left the homeland just in time. The Ukraine had once been a breadbasket, but climate change had made it a dustbowl, and those of his relatives who were still there were starving. He did not say that many would be dead already if he did not send money, but Tom knew. Tom also knew that the amounts he sent were what kept him lean.

  Albert Mettnitzky spent most of his time in an upstairs office. He displayed his own green coverall on the floor of his Greengenes franchise only when there were too many customers for Tom to handle or, as now, when it was time to lock up for the day.

  “It’s been a good day, Tommy. A good day. You go home now, and kiss that Muffy for me.”

  Tom grinned. He said almost the same words every day. “I’ll do that, Bert. See you tomorrow.”

  Tom Cross grimaced as the damp heat beyond the store’s door reminded him of the quiet hum of the heat pump that kept the store cool in summer and warm in winter. He grimaced again when he smelled…

  Some days, the sidewalk in front of the store was totally blocked by Engineer demonstrators. Today, there was only one, wearing a blue coverall streaked with sweat stains, new and old. He wore a golden cogwheel, the emblem of the cult-like movement, on his breast pocket. His beard was unkempt and his body lean to the point of emaciation. His red-rimmed, glaring eyes refused to settle long on any particular part of the scenery, bouncing from the store’s display windows to the traffic of gengineered vehicles in the street to the pedestrians, most of whom did not share his obsession. He smiled only when he saw one of the rare automobiles whose owners could afford fuel and hand-made parts. Most of the old vehicles had long since lost their original bodies to rust. The sheet metal was usually replaced with hand-crafted wood and gleaming varnish.

  The Engineer did not smile for bicycles, for they were too common. Though they were mechanical, their virtues of simplicity and convenience had let them survive intact the transition to a technology centered on biology.

  The picketer’s sign said simply “MACHINES, NOT GENES!” Most Engineers expressed their hatred of the gengineering that had supplanted the Machine Age more violently. Full-scale demonstrations were often marked by litterbug barbecues or Roachster bakes.

  Tom stood in the Garden’s doorway long enough to watch the man pace slowly past him, turn, and pace back as far as the strip of green that separated the Garden from the electronics store next door. That strip was heavily overgrown with the honeysuckle vines that had appeared everywhere in the past year or so, and the vines, as always, bore a heavy crop of blossoms the size of small wineglasses. Each one held a mouthful of nectar, self-fermented and laced with a mildly euphoric drug.

  The picketer plucked a blossom and drained its load of honeysuckle wine. His eyes promptly glazed. Tom shook his head and walked around the man. At the corner, he boarded a Bernie, a modified Saint Bernard with a passenger pod on its back. A few blocks later, he was on the street again, and whistling as he approached his apartment building. He was looking forward to the little time he would have with Muffy. She was still what she had been when he first had met her, the Spider Lady at The Spider’s Web. An exotic dancer, necessarily a night worker, and one with a following, too. But he was the only one of her fans to…

  A high-backed Armadon, mad offspring of a gene-splicer and an armadillo, clattered down the road away from him. Like Roachsters, Armadons had wheels grown from their shells; their legs ran backwards atop the wheels to turn them, and that was what made the clatter. It had been parked near his own front door, but that did not disturb hi
m. This was city, and the streets were lined with Roachsters, Hoppers, Beetles, and other vehicles. There were even a few internal combustion antiques.

  He only glanced at the knee-high evergreen shrubs that lined the walkway between the sidewalk and the entrance to his building. He paid even less attention to the ancient paneling in the building’s small lobby, or the carved moldings, or the marble floor beneath his feet. He had registered the building’s signs of age when he and Muffy had first moved in, pegged them as too-ample sign that the place was a dump, and forgotten them. Now the building was home, even if there were three flights of stairs between the street and their apartment. He usually paused only long enough to see if Muffy had fetched the mail and to unlock the glass door.

  This time, however, Tom ignored the rack of mailboxes to his right. The glass door was shattered, and the shards lay at the foot of the stairs, beyond the frame. Someone had not waited to be buzzed in, or to get out their key. It seemed, quite simply, that they had walked through the door as if it were not there.

  He froze, thinking that it must have happened very recently. No one had begun to clean up the debris. Yet there were no cops around. Hadn’t anyone noticed?

  He stepped through the door’s empty frame, careful not to catch his coverall on the jagged teeth that jutted from the rim. His feet crunched on broken glass, and when he caught himself swearing at the noise, he wondered: Whoever it was, could they still be here? What did they want? Whose apartment door had they broken down? Who were they raping, murdering, torturing, robbing?

  Muffy?

  The thought struck him like a blow. His knees sagged beneath him for just a second, but he quelled the involuntary response, looked upward as if he thought he could see through all the floors and walls between him and their apartment. Then he took a deep breath and ran up the stairs.

  The first floor apartments were closed, their doors intact and undisturbed. The same was true on the second floor. But on the third—the door to Tom’s apartment was open. Beyond it, a throw rug had been kicked into a heap. A chair lay on its side. A spray of dirt told him that a fallen houseplant lay just to the left of his field of view.