Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  Randy was clinging to Frederick’s torso with all but two of her seven remaining legs. She turned to face the man from BRA, waving the free pair, and hissed.

  “So were the shoats,” said Frederick. “And we’re not gengineers, either.”

  “The curator told me you were responsible for producing them.”

  “They’re our kids, and they’re just as natural as any litterhead bureaucrat. Maybe more so!” When Frederick stopped, Porculata snarled, “Get out!” and began to play a martial tune of the sort for which bagpipes had long been meant. For the first time, Jim noticed that a compass rose was tattooed on her throat. The shoats added their own tones to her music, and there was none of the gaiety one might have expected from a pair of instruments whose name still meant “circus” even though the wandering shows for which calliopes had been designed had long been extinct.

  “You’d better. They’re not very mobile, but we are.” As Tom spoke, Jim picked up the agent’s briefcase and set it on the table. He and Julia then both grabbed fistsful of paper and crammed them into the case. After a moment of stunned immobility, the agent pushed them aside and finished the job himself. He did not try to straighten the crumpled mess they had made.

  When the auditorium door had closed behind him, Porculata screeched, the bagpipe still strong in her voice, “He’ll be back! I’m psychic, you know, and he’ll be back. Just as soon as he realizes the kids are legal, but we’re not!” Her voice trailed off at the last, bubbling into a sob. Frederick squirmed in his padded support frame and said, “Tommy? Move me next to her? Please?”

  Tom was obliging when Jim looked at the shoats, who had said nothing throughout the crisis. “Tommy? Can’t they…?”

  Tom shook his head as Frederick answered. “None of us can move much on our own. And they can’t talk. But they understand, and they hate that bastard. Right, boys?”

  They answered with strident blasts of sound.

  “Now,” said Frederick. “As they used to say: Shit!”

  When the humans looked puzzled by the archaic curse, he added, “You were telling me what happened to Muffy, and I never got a chance to react.”

  Tom shrugged. “I wanted to tell you, talk about it, you know? Get it off my chest. But you had troubles of your own. And so does Jim.”

  Briefly, Julia explained how Jim had lost his truck.

  “Huh.” The sound was a soft hooting noise. “Well, my problems are done now. You did a good job of chasing him off.”

  “We make a good team. Or we used to.”

  “What d’ya mean, used to? Sounds like you need some help now.”

  “It’s not the same thing…”

  Porculata squirmed in her seat and began to shriek: “You’d better not leave me! I won’t stand for it! I can’t take care of the kids all by myself! And if you do, you’d better forget right now any thought of deflowering any strange ladies!”

  Halfway through her tirade, Jim and Julia turned away to hide their grins. They were thus the first to see the man standing in the stage’s wings. He wasn’t very tall, his skin was ruddy, and his forehead stopped only when his hairline was even with the tops of his ears. He wore a tan coverall and a tweed jacket, and he was grinning back at them while holding a finger to his lips.

  “But Honey-buns, Pork-pie, Gravy-down-my-gullet Sweetums, the kids are almost as big as you are. The staff takes care of them. And I haven’t been anywhere in ages!”

  Porculata answered her mate more calmly, though her words were still punctuated by bagpipish squawks: “I’m psychic. You know it! And if you go, you’ll be a help, all right. But only if you stay away from the ladies, and that’s impossible, so you stay right here. I need you!”

  When she ran down, Frederick rolled his eyes as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?” The stranger in the wings stepped forward, still grinning, and said, “If you wish, Frederick, I can give you a leave of absence.” Then he looked at Tom Cross. “Did something happen? Where’s Muffy?”

  The garbage disposal made an unmusical noise. “The way you’re all shoving,” he said, “I guess I haven’t got much choice. So I’ll go.” He rolled his eyes. “Hey, Frankie, you know where to find that handcart I rode in on?” Then, as if realizing that Jim didn’t know who Frankie was and Julia didn’t know anything about the handcart, he added, “When we ran away from home, Tommy jammed me in beside his suitcase and trundled the whole schmear down the road. Pinched my toes and pounded my butt black and blue.” He sighed ostentatiously. “Now he’ll do it again. And he’s Franklin Peirce, the curator around here. He knows what’s in all the closets.”

  “I hope so,” said Peirce.

  Tom began to explain to the curator why Muffy wasn’t with him.

  Jim interrupted with, “He came here to see Freddy.”

  Porculata butted in with, “Just wanted aid and comfort.”

  Peirce said, “And I’m sure Frederick will give it to him.”

  The garbage disposal said, “Just call me Freddy. For the duration, anyway, since I won’t be a singer again till I get back.”

  Porculata began to sob, “I’ll never see you again!” But she didn’t say a word about being psychic.

  Julia Templeton said, “Shaddap everybody! Tom was talking!”

  In the sudden silence, he looked at her gratefully. Then he continued with the story. When he was done, Peirce shook his head and said, “I’m sorry. I really wish I could help. But the leave of absence is about all I can do.”

  They stood in the museum’s main door, looking out. The rain had increased, and the air that swept around their ankles was damp and chilly. Tom held the handles of the handcart in which Freddy sat, braced with a pair of pillows Peirce had liberated from a staff lounge. Randy sat beside the garbage disposal, patting him over and over with her palps, as if to reassure herself that though she had lost one friend, she had regained another.

  “Forget it,” Freddy said. “You can take me right back downstairs where it’s warm and dry. I admit it, I’ve been spoiled. I don’t want pneumonia. I don’t even want a bruised butt again. I’d rather…”

  Tom tsked. “You’ve been wetter. Remember when the sink leaked all over you?”

  Freddy made a disgusted noise. “At least this is clean.”

  “We haven’t seen the sculptures,” said Jim. “Let’s stay here awhile, and maybe the rain’ll quit.”

  “I thought we wanted to find Muffy,” said Julia. “And what’s going on over there?” She pointed to the left, where an open lawn had disappeared beneath a small crowd, all wearing raincoats and ponchos over their coveralls. The people were milling about, separating into two groups, one that hung loosely around the other, which formed itself into two circles. The outer group began to clap and voices raised in a song that soon became recognisable as the ancient “Havah Nagilah.” To one side watched a pair of Engineers in raincoats the color of their blue coveralls. Their faces wore matching dour expressions.

  The circles began to move, counterrotating so that, for a moment, each person in one circle faced each person in the other. As they passed, their hands raised, swung, and met. The sounds that echoed across the lawn were solid clacks whose rhythm grew synchronized by the pounding words and feet and, driven by the song, accelerated. Whatever they held to make the clacks was hard, but it was also invisible except for occasional flashes of color.

  Peirce explained what was going on. “They’re holding worrystones.” He reached into a pocket and withdrew an egg-sized chunk of translucent, glowing green. The shape was that of a tetrahedron that had been half melted in a fire, pinched in the middle, and slightly stretched. Within it hovered an amorphous glob. A gold-colored chain passed through a hole bored in one end. Peirce ran his thumb over the stone’s curves and said, “Very soothing, but they also interact. If you knock the right pair of stones together, they chime.”

  As if to prove his point, a ringing noise lifted above the moving circles on the lawn. Two figures walked away from the danc
e arm in arm.

  “People think they have some mystic affinity with whoever rings their chimes.” He shrugged. “The dance out there is to give them a chance to knock stones with as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”

  “I should think they’d get pneumonia,” said Julia.

  Peirce shrugged again. “They don’t seem to care, but we…We feel responsible. We sponsored the artist who…He modified iguanas. The stones form inside their skulls, and they contain a bit of nerve tissue.” He pointed at the shapeless glob within the stone. “It’s alive, but…” He shook his head. “I’m not sure even the artist understands exactly what he did.”

  “How long do they last?” asked Jim.

  “A year, at least. That’s how long they’ve been available.”

  “I haven’t seen them, and…”

  “I know, Tom. You’re here often, but mostly only on weekends. They show up during the week, and they seem to prefer the nastier days, as if they don’t want too many observers.”

  Tom grinned, while Peirce fell silent for a moment. Then the museum curator ran his eyes over the group. “None of you,” he said, “are wearing pendants.”

  Jim shrugged. “Truckers don’t.”

  “Most don’t,” Julia corrected him.

  With a grin, Peirce offered, “We sell them in the giftshop. Would you like any? They say they bring luck, and it’s one more thing I can do, after all.”

  Soon, a worrystone dangled from a chain around the neck of each member of the party except for Randy. Julia’s was a green almost precisely the same shade as Franklin Peirce’s. Tom’s was a gold laced with threads of red. Jim’s was a clear sky-blue. Freddy’s was yellow.

  The three young people were standing in the rotunda outside the giftshop, their new luck charms in their hands, when Freddy squirmed in his handcart and said, “So knock’em already. Maybe you’ll find out you’re all soul-mates.”

  Franklin Peirce emerged from behind the shop’s counter with a small box in his hand. “Here,” he said. “One more.” He held it out to Tom. “Give it to Muffy when you find her.”

  Tom Cross accepted the box. His eyes watered. Freddy repeated his cry, “Knock’em!”

  Jim and Julia looked at each other as if each found the idea just a little silly. It was superstition, of course, just like the notion that the stones could bring luck. “Go on,” said Freddy. They moved closer, raised their stones on their chains, and knocked them gently together.

  The only sound was a quiet click.

  “Now Tommy,” said Freddy, and Julia Templeton turned toward him. Perhaps fortunately, they drew the same quiet click, as did Julia and Peirce. Nor did Jim find a chime with the other two men, nor Tom with Peirce.

  “And now you,” said Julia. One by one, the humans leaned over the handcart to click their stones against Freddy’s. Still there were no chimes.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  “Now what?” asked Freddy. He was still sitting in the handcart, propped by a pair of now-damp pillows. “Where are we going to look for Muffy? Or Jim’s truck?”

  They were crowded into the cab of Blackie, Julia Templeton’s Mack. Tom Cross sat on the floor beside the handcart. Randy was in his lap. Julia drove slowly down the boulevard that led traffic past the museum. Jim Brane had the seat beside her.

  “The police are looking,” said Tom.

  “We can’t do much but wait,” said Julia.

  “We could go to the apartment,” said Tom.

  “Or the Farm,” Jim added to the list of options.

  “We could get drunk,” said Freddy.

  “Or wait sober.” Julia gave the pig a reproving stare.

  “I’ve got some scotch,” said Tom. He sounded wistful, as if that option held a strong appeal.

  “There’s always honeysuckle wine, too,” said Jim.

  Freddy snorted. “I’d rather twiddle my thumbs.” He wiggled his stubby forelimbs as if to draw his trotters to their attention. “If I had thumbs.”

  “How about lunch?” Julia pointed ahead and to the left where a small restaurant lay washed nearly free of patrons by the weather. On sunnier days, it would fatten on the flow of people to and from the museum and the park beyond. Today, however, they would have it almost to themselves.

  When they entered, they saw that it held a single bored looking waiter who wore over the ubiquitous coverall a tailless striped shirt with dark bands around the upper arms. He was leaning against one end of the bar and chatting desultorily with an androgynous bartender whose face bore both a mustache and eye shadow. The only other customers were a trio of determinedly blue-rinsed ladies at a table by the far window. Their coveralls were decorated with cameo brooches and ruffled sleeves and collars.

  The ladies were so quick to jump to their feet when they saw Freddy that they beat the waiter to their table. “We saw you once,” one said. “In the museum. Singing.”

  “And very nicely, too,” added the second. Her cheeks, just forward of her ears, bore inserts of tortoise shell. They were faded by time, relics of a day when it had been all the rage to induce patches of human skin to transform into jewel-like fragments of insect wings and reptile hide. “Could we have your autograph?”

  “Don’t be silly, Bets!” said the third. She reached out as if to touch Freddy’s stubby forelimbs. He flinched away as best he could. “He can’t write!”

  “Excuse me,” said the waiter, reaching past them with the bread basket and a sheaf of menus adorned with a sepia photo of a bicycle with an over-sized front wheel and a bicyclist with a shirt similar to his own. His movement brought his arm close to a mass of bristly black fur on Tom’s shoulder. When he realized what he was almost touching, he jerked away, face white.

  “Well, then, how about a paw print? Or…” Bets’s voice hesitated as she realized what she had said. “A hoof print?”

  “I’ll give you a print, all right,” said Freddy. “I’ll give you a…” His voice choked off as Tom crammed a muffin into his mouth.

  Jim, grinning, said, “You’d better go. His manners are really inexcusable, you know.”

  “It’s not surprising,” said Tom. “He is a pig, after all. And he got his start in a strip joint. We sang bawdy duets.” And he’s not used to fans, he thought. We weren’t famous when we sang together, and now the museum protects him from the gropies.

  “Like’the Duchess and the Student’?” offered the lady who had spoken first.

  “Maude!” said the third.

  “Don’t be silly, Emily,” answered Maude. “You laughed too the day we heard that one.” But she let her friend seize her arm and pull her away.

  Freddy swallowed noisily. “Killjoy,” he said. “I was just going to…”

  “I know you,” said Tom. “You want another muffin?”

  “Your mother was a coin-op,” the pig replied. Tom winced, but he said nothing.

  Jim reached for a roll himself, but only to break and butter it. “So now what?” he asked.

  “It’s obvious,” said Freddy. “And yes, I want another muffin. In pieces, this time. I get enough stomach-aches already. And butter it, like Jimmy’s.”

  Julia obliged him as Tom Cross said, “What do you mean, it’s obvious?”

  “You’ve got your best friend back,” said Freddy. “You’ve got me back. But I’ll bet you still haven’t called your parents.”

  Julia stopped feeding the pig and stared at Tom. Jim shrugged and said, “What do you expect, Julia? He stole the family garbage disposal the day he ran away. Can you imagine what happened the first time someone tried to use the sink after that?”

  “I hope they laughed. Later, anyway. But why’d he run away?” As she spoke, Julia turned toward Tom and laid a hand on his forearm. “Why did you?”

  Tom had met Julia for the first time just that day. She was a stranger, but she was also Jim’s girlfriend, and Jim was his buddy from years before. Therefore, she was his friend, too, or at least she could be, and she was n
ice, kind and caring, the sort of person he would like for a friend of his own. So was Muffy.

  He stared at the tabletop, silent, bowing under the twin weights of loss and the painful reminder of what he had thrown away. Freddy answered for him: “He found out his Daddy wasn’t really his Daddy. That tumbled Mommy right off her pedestal, and then…”

  “They’ve gotta still be mad,” said Tom. “I haven’t dared…”

  “It’s been years,” said Freddy.

  “Freddy’s right,” said Julia. “Right after lunch, let’s go see them.”

  “But why should we?”

  “Isn’t that what families are for? Even more than friends? So you can go to them for help and support and encouragement?”

  “But only then? Only when you need…?” Tom knew he sounded plaintive.

  Jim snorted. “I’ve seen it that way as often as not.”

  Later, when Tom tried to give her directions, she said, “I know the way. You lived next door to each other, right? Your folks are in that pumpkin? And Jim’s taken me home to meet his folks. While yours have never heard of Muffy.”

  Tom hung his head, ashamed of himself, knowing that he had indeed waited far too long, aching with the knowledge that if he never saw Muffy again, neither would his parents, and then…He would have no one to help him hold the memory. She would be twice as gone, twice as dead, and he twice as diminished by her loss. He stared out the side of Blackie’s pod, watching the rain slant through the air, dimpling puddles, dripping from leaves, spraying from the feet and wheels of other vehicles.

  Their destination was one of the city’s several suburbs. The streets there, unlike those in the city, were paved with turf, and when Blackie’s feet hit that softer pavement, each step became a squelching splash. The houses that lined the roads changed from stone and concrete high-rises to small brick and wood bungalows to bioforms such as the Cross family owned. Lights, turned on against the greyness of the day, testified that within their walls all the many sorts of homes were much the same.