Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  He stilled his panting long enough to cry, “Muffy?”

  When there was no answer, he repeated his call. Finally, he tested the door’s knob. The latch was broken.

  He entered the apartment. “Muffy?”

  The broken houseplant was an amaryllis, an “Alice” so gengineered that its blossom resembled a human face. It had just the one blossom, for the gengineers had merged the four large blooms typical of an unmodified amaryllis. They had also removed the amaryllis’s yearly rhythm, so that Alices needed no winter dormant period and indeed would produce new blooms as soon as the old ones faded.

  At the moment, this one’s bloom, its face, looked as if, if only that were possible, it would cry. It had fallen from a dresser beside the door, along with a book, a photograph, and a small pottery dish in which they had kept odd coins. The dish was as shattered as the downstairs door. The coins were scattered on the floor.

  Tom Cross picked up the photo and turned it over. It was of Muffy, one he had taken at the art museum. She was standing in front of a pointillist rendition of a human head formed by a cloud of gengineered gnats. What they pictured changed constantly in expression, sex, and apparent age; the camera had caught a fatherly figure, beaming proudly down upon Tom’s mate.

  He set it back on the dresser. Where was Muffy? He called again, and again there was no answer. He searched the apartment, but it was small and it did not take him long to be sure she was not there. Nor, by the time he had finished, did he wonder what had happened. The bedroom was in perfect order. So was the kitchen. The back door was intact. The intruders, whoever they were, had broken in the front door and caught her immediately. She had struggled, but the signs were all here, in the living room. And then they had taken her away. But why?

  He stood at the window. Its frame was wreathed in the ever-present honeysuckle vines. Most people, he thought, kept the vines trimmed back from their windows. Many even tried to keep them from growing in their yards, though the plants were insistent. But Muffy liked them. She wanted them hovering in the apartment windows, like drapes, she sometimes said, only fresher, prettier, more useful.

  He had to admit the vines were prettier, though they did, as now, have a tendency to drape themselves over the sill. He picked up the intruding vegetation and pushed it outside. When it fell away from the masonry, he caught his breath. Had Muffy or her kidnappers grabbed at the vines? Had they struggled here? Had she tried to escape? He didn’t think the vines would hold her weight.

  Some of the vines’ tendrils were broken. He picked fragments from the sill, fingered the stubs, and made a face at the stickiness of the sap that leaked from them. Where was she? Why had they taken her?

  He took a step, and one foot made a “snick-ick” noise as he pulled against a stickiness. He looked. Three honeysuckle blossoms lay crushed upon the wooden floor, their pink and cream flesh discolored by dirt and bruises. The invasion had been too recent for their spilled nectar to dry entirely, but someone had stepped in one of the puddles and the footprints had had time to grow syrupy. Small insects hovered in the air around the sticky patches.

  He sniffed. The sickly sweet odor of honeysuckle wine dominated the room. He wondered how Muffy could stand to drink the stuff. She had persuaded him to try it, but only once. He had not liked its taste or smell.

  Nor had he liked what he thought it did to Muffy. She had once been vivacious, active, a joy to be with. But ever since she had taken up honey sucking, she had had spells of seeming tired, uninvolved, languid.

  He knew that languidness. The wine had made him want to stretch out on a mossy bank, arms spread to the sun, smiling and uncaring, disconnected from the animal rush of life. He hadn’t liked the feeling.

  A scrabbling noise behind the couch brought him out of his reverie and made his last hopes fall. He turned away from the window. “Randy?”

  Randy scuttled from her hiding place, mute evidence that Muffy could not simply have left early for her job. The spider was the size of a cat, black and shaggy, and she was essential to Muffy’s work. And besides, the wreckage in the apartment could not be due to simple burglars, or vandals. Nothing seemed to be missing, except for Muffy. And the damage was hardly enough to satisfy vandals.

  He noticed that one of Randy’s legs was trailing. When she reached Tom’s feet, she made a “Meep” noise and waved her palps.

  She was usually silent, except when she was hungry or curious about some novel rustle in the vines outside the window. Tom bent and picked her up. She was quivering like a plucked string. “Hurting, are you?” The useless leg was crushed, as if someone had tried to kick the genimal out of the way, or to step on her. He petted her stiff and wiry fur, picked from it the kitties that had been under the couch, talked to her, tried to soothe her. In a few minutes, Randy bent in his hands, trying to reach the base of the broken limb with her mouth.

  “I wish you could tell me what happened,” he said as she chewed. The leg came free and fell to the floor. He wondered whether it would grow back when she molted again. “You won’t be much good to her with only seven legs, will you?” Randy was both Muffy’s pet and the prop she used in her dancing. Her fan, her feather boa, her bubbles. That had impressed him once, when he had just run away from home, when he and Freddy had wanted to be singers together.

  He had already lost his father. He had found out that his mother’s husband had not sired him. That had been a neighbor, a man who had moved away from the neighborhood before ever he had been born. Then, by running away, he had forfeited his mother, and he had never tried to return home. Now Muffy was gone. It felt like a retribution of the fates.

  Even Freddy had moved on, and Tom hadn’t been able to sing alone. He had worked in the Web’s kitchen for awhile. Then he had found his present job, and this apartment, and Muffy had moved in with him. And now…

  His eyes watered. He took a deep, shuddering breath. Why? Why?

  Had the Engineers, those perfervid reactionaries, taken offense at her dancing? At Randy? Had they taken offense at him and his job at the Garden? Was she gone forever? Or would the phone ring and some strange voice demand that he quit his job or burn the Garden or poison the stock? And then, only then, would they release her. They did such things. They had learned well the lessons of a century of terrorism.

  He stepped across the room. The phone hung on the wall near the kitchen door. The cord was intact. He took it off its hook and held it to his ear. The dial tone was there, normal, undamaged. He hung up again, and he stared at the phone, willing it to ring, willing it to tell him what was going on. He even willed it to know what was going on, but the “message waiting” light remained stubbornly dark.

  He knew he was being silly. If they were going to call, they would wait. They would want his nerves as much on edge as possible. They would want him to be grateful for the call, so that he would do what they wanted.

  And there was no way that Muffy had done it all herself. She wasn’t emotionally violent. She never had been, and honey suckers never were. The honey made them quiet, passive, content to do no more than sit and suck more honey. Muffy wasn’t as far gone as most, for she retained the energy to dance. But the tendencies were there. They had been there, perhaps, even before she discovered the honey’s charms.

  So he shouldn’t just wait. He should do something. He looked at his watch. Only twenty minutes had passed since he had entered the building. His stomach rumbled. He would, he thought, wait just a little longer. While he waited…The refrigerator was an old model, and while it kept food cold enough, its memory was failing. Once, long before Tom and Muffy had moved into the apartment, it had kept track of its contents and automatically printed out shopping lists. Now, when he touched its handle, it muttered lists of foods Tom and Muffy could not afford and of brand-names no one had seen in many years. “Haagen-Daaz,” it said. “Lobster tails. Sara Lee. Prime rib.”

  Modern food supposedly tasted much the same, though the sources had changed practically beyond all recognition
. He thought of pie plants and sammitch bushes and broccoli trees and hamberries. Lobster could still be had, for a price, but for most people…The potster salad in the leftover container before him was made from a hybrid of potato and lobster, and if it tasted much like the latter, it looked and grew like the former.

  He forced himself to eat the salad before he reached for the phone again. Then, while he was waiting for the police to arrive, he paced. He held Randy in his arms, petting the bristly fur, and he remembered. He and Freddy had been on stage for the first time in their lives, singing dirty songs to warm Muffy’s audience up for her. There had been boozy cheers and catcalls when they had finished, and then someone had patted his shoulder and murmured, “Good job, guys.” The voice was soft, feminine, but when he turned, no one was there.

  “Watch the stage, dummy,” Freddy had told him.

  In the glare of the spot, he had seen: black hair, glistening in the light, falling halfway down a bare back: a mass of black fur cradled in a bare arm: a profile undimmed by cloth of any kind. He had gasped in unison with the collective sigh of the nightclub’s patrons.

  He had met her later, and later still she had joined him for breakfast in the nightclub’s kitchen. They had become friends. She had introduced him to the art museum where Freddy now lived. And then his bud had begun to swell and itch. It had grown painful, and one morning he had been unable to get out of bed.

  She had come to him then. She had helped him unfurl his leaves and open his bud.

  They had been inseparable ever since. Until now.

  The tears came. He let Randy climb upon his shoulder to taste them.

  He wished that she had never tasted honeysuckle wine.

  He heard the boom of Sparrowhawk wings in the air outside the window. The cops had arrived. He sighed at the thought of talking, of strangers poking through his and Muffy’s life, but he also felt a surge of hope. They would find her. They had to. That was their job.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  The chatters, wheezes, hums, and rattles of the city’s afternoon traffic flowed through the open truck window at Jim Brane’s elbow. The streets were full of bioform vehicles, and the sidewalks were a river of humanity clad in coveralls of a thousand colors and designs, with a million ornamentations of patches, embroideries, sashes, and medallions. Some individuals wore other garments—jackets, vests, even skirts—over their coveralls.

  Outside the truck window, just ahead, cocked backward to catch his voice, was an ear the size of a bedspread, held erect except for a flopping tip. On the right side of the Mack’s great brindle head, the ear was folded down. Tige’s shape made clear his canine ancestry. His only marking was a white circle around one eye.

  Jim’s markings were only a little more elaborate. He wore the blue coveralls of an indentured trucker. Shoulder patches tagged him with the Daisy Hill Truck Farm’s distinctive logo, a black-eared white beagle. The logo’s aptness was lost in the mists of time; the Farm’s products were descended not from beagles, but from bulldogs. A similar emblem adorned the side of the fiberglass pod strapped to the Mack’s back. The control compartment or cab in which Jim sat was at the forward end of the pod. The rear was for cargo.

  Greasy smoke and an enticing odor poured from a parking lot a block ahead and on the right. As Jim and Tige drew closer, they could see that the lot held no vehicles, except as wreckage. It had been taken over by a small mob of Engineers, a few of whom were still breaking up the shack that had sheltered the lot’s attendant from the elements. There was no sign of the attendant.

  The rest of the Engineers were gathered around a fire built of the broken lumber. Over it they had hung a gutted litterbug and chunks of Roachster tail and Hopper haunch. They faced the street, some of them holding bullhorns to their mouths, all of them screaming slogans such as, “EAT THE CORRUPTIONS OF LIFE!” When an old mechanical automobile passed by, they cheered. When the vehicle was a gengineered Roachster or Armadon or Beetle, they threw rocks.

  Someone even threw a rock at Tige. But where other vehicles dodged and accelerated and did their best to escape as quickly as they could the neighborhood of the parking lot, when the rock clattered on the pod’s side, the Mack just stopped. As horns then blared from behind, Tige turned his great head toward the lot and growled.

  The Engineers fell silent. They dropped their rocks. They turned away from the feast they had planned. Only a few dared to shake their fists.

  Jim leaned toward his right hand window and showed his teeth in as fierce a grin as he could manage. He could feel the heat of the fire, even above the heat emanating from the city’s pavements and buildings. He wished he dared to do more than make faces. He would love to turn Tige into the lotto chase the fanatics, screaming, back to their holes, to scatter the coals of the fire, to seize their meat, nearly done now, judging from the smell. Tige would love that. He would love that.

  His stomach rumbled, but he knew better. His instructors at the Farm had drummed it into his head over and over again, and into the heads of his fellow trainees, that reacting to the Engineers’ provocations could mean only trouble. It might be very, very satisfying, but though they were a minority, they were still a vocal force in society, and they had a great many silent sympathizers. If he attacked them, he would only help their cause.

  He yawned. He had been on the job since six that morning, and he should have quit two hours before. Then, as deliberately as he had grinned, he turned his attention back to the road. “Move it, Tige.” The department store that was his destination was not far away now. In fact, there was the alley that led to the loading dock.

  “Slow down, Tige. Ease right. A hair left. Let’s stop, now. Back up. Swing right, left, straight. Stop. Good boy, Tige.” Jim seemed to be steering his Mack truck by voice alone, but a careful observer might have noticed that as he spoke, his hands never left the steering wheel, while his feet danced from throttle to brake. The controls were mounted on a cabinet whose top was covered with rocker switches and flashing diodes, a control cabinet precisely the same as those found in all bioform vehicles. It held a computer which the government’s Bioform Regulatory Administration insisted always be connected to the genimal’s brain. Bioform vehicles were supposed to be plugged in, not trained, so that they obeyed the driver’s hands and feet, not his voice.

  Jim waved at the crew waiting on the loading dock. He recognized them all, for he had made many deliveries here, both as a student trucker and since his graduation last spring to journeyman status. “Hey, Sam!” he called to the crew’s silver-haired and dark-skinned chief. “Let me get it open.” He yawned again, jumped from his compartment, patted the Mack’s shoulder, ducked a string of drool, tossed a biscuit the size of a football between the massive jaws, and touched—for luck—the chrome model of an old mechanical eighteen-wheeler that swung from the Mack’s collar. Automobiles still existed; the old freight-haulers had been extinct for decades. Then he went behind Tige, where the crew was waiting, and unlocked the pod’s cargo compartment.

  The doors swung open to reveal stacked bolts of multicolored fabric from the bacterial cultures of Chicago Micro. Sam Gundar, the crew chief, stepped onto the lip of the pod to survey the shipment. “Is that all? We’ve been expecting a load of mechin’ draperies. Not to mention underwear and shirts.”

  Jim yawned once more and waved a hand. “I can’t help you there,” he said. “I just pick up and deliver.”

  “I know that, son.” Sam spat onto the stained pavement below. “It’s those goddam biofabrics. They haven’t got the bugs out yet, is all.” He spat again, added, “They never will,” and turned toward the dock. “C’mon, guys.”

  Jim shrugged and took the invoice pack from its hook on the wall. As the store’s crew unloaded, he used its electronic wand to tick off the items. When the pod was empty, he held out the pack. Sam signed his acceptance of the shipment, Jim pushed a button, and the pack bleeped its record of the transaction through Tige’s computer to the office back at t
he Farm. At the bleep, Sam shook his head and said, “Don’t trust us much, do you?”

  Jim shrugged again. “I do. They don’t.”

  They didn’t, either, he thought as he talked and wrestled Tige out of the alley and back into the flow of traffic. They refused to take any chance that an invoice would be lost on the road back to the Farm, or that a trucker would have the time to falsify his records. They knew that the Farm stayed in business only as long as its reputation remained unblemished.

  The parking lot was empty now, the Engineers gone, their roast litterbug and Roachster and Hopper nothing but scraps of bone and shell. A live litterbug was nosing at that part of the mess; it would be gone within minutes. Police wreckers, great-clawed Crabs, were removing the vehicles the Engineers had destroyed. A man and a woman in fire department coveralls, slickers, and helmets were spraying water from backpack tanks over the still-smoldering remnants of the fire, raking the coals, and spraying more water. To one side of the lot, the attendant, returned from wherever he had taken refuge, was already guiding civilian vehicles into parking spaces.

  They didn’t trust, he thought again. But they weren’t too clamphole about it. They had given him two years of training as a trucker. They had let him choose his own pup. The price he had accepted—driving for the Farm for ten years—had seemed cheap enough when they had offered him the contract. It still did. In ten years, he’d be just thirty. And Tige would be all his, and he would be free, an independent trucker.

  He did not yet know whether he would continue to wear the shoulder patches. Some truckers did, as a badge of origin. They even continued to drive for their training Farms. Others didn’t.

  Jim thought he might. Both sides benefited from the deal, after all, and they owed each other loyalty. The Farm got a driver. And though the Farm didn’t pay well at all—at least until he worked off his indenture—he got his training, his Mack, and all the help he needed while it was growing. Not to mention a place to live. And Julia.