Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  The edge of the bioform neighborhood was marked by a dilapidated mosque, its minaret overgrown with honeysuckle. Tom remembered playing with Jim and other kids in its empty courtyards. Now smoke rose from those courtyards, and ancient mechanical vehicles, in many stages of dilapidation, were parked helter-skelter against the outer walls. Three figures in telltale blue coveralls lounged in the main doorway. The Engineers had adopted the building as their local base.

  Tom Cross snorted at the aptness of the Engineers’ choice. As boys, he and Jim Brane had puzzled over the mosque’s abandonment until they had thought to ask at the local library. There they had learned it had happened a century before. When certain Moslem groups had chosen to threaten with destruction all writers, actors, politicians, and other public figures who offended their conservative beliefs, the nation’s government had decided that Islam, as a religion, was too great a threat to social progress, human rights, and freedom to tolerate. It had then deported all avowed Moslems, claiming that the legal precedent had been set long before, with the deportations of the Mafiosi. A few had argued that the deportations were as irrational as the Moslem death squads, but they had accomplished nothing. Still others had argued that the problem was not Islam, but intolerant, irrational, fundamentalist fanaticism of all kinds—Moslem, Christian, Jewish, Communist, Capitalist—but they had accomplished even less. Some cows were too sacred to gore.

  Julia turned Blackie around the last corner, and there the houses were, two in a long row of bioforms, pumpkins, beanstalks, squash, a Chinese lantern, a puffball, the layer of plastic that strengthened its inflated skin glinting slickly in the rain. The Branes lived in a Swiss-style chalet mounted atop a beanstalk some fifteen meters high that twined around a concrete pillar that provided wind resistance, added strength, and housed an elevator shaft. The beanstalk bore both flowers and fruit.

  The Cross pumpkin was a six-room house shaded by the immense leaves and decorated by the yellow blossoms of its parent vine. Both the beanstalk and the pumpkin were twined around with honeysuckle vines. Honeysuckle blossoms dangled over the railing of the porch that surrounded the chalet on three sides. They wreathed the pumpkin’s doorway and windows. They littered the ground.

  The pumpkin’s blossoms were sterile, for the plant had been gengineered to bear only the one fruit. That fruit, once it had reached its full size, had been levered onto a concrete stand and its flesh had been chiseled out with jackhammers. The shell had been allowed to dry and coated inside and out with preservatives and sealants. Windows and doors had been cut, partitions and wiring and plumbing installed, and Petra and Ralph Cross had moved in. Tom had been born later.

  Jim peered upward at his parents’ chalet, lightless in the rainy gloom, and said, “The Armadon’s not there. They’re at work.” His father, Abraham Brane, was a textdisk editor; his mother, Lisa, was a statistical analyst for a law firm. “And Caleb’s in school.” Caleb was his younger brother.

  Tom’s legal father was a department store bioppliance buyer. His mother didn’t work, so even though the Cross family vehicle, a Roachster, was not in the drive, there was light in the pumpkin’s windows. “She’s home,” he said, and Julia turned her Mack into the drive.

  They left the handcart and Randy in the Mack. Jim carried Freddy while Tom tried the knob to the front door. The latch clicked. He hesitated, pushed the door halfway open, and leaned forward. “Mom?”

  There was no answer other than a low murmur from another room. “Mom?”

  Finally, the murmur quieted and a slurred voice said, “Who’s there? C’min.”

  They entered, passing through a small entry into a kitchen whose counters were littered, its sink stacked, with dirty dishes. Dirty laundry was mounded on the table. The dry stalk of a long-dead pie-plant jutted from an earthenware pot by the window. Paint was peeling from the window frame. The floor gritted under their feet, and the air was sickly with the reek of honeysuckle wine spilled and soured and of blossoms rotted on the floor.

  Tom’s voice was low with surprise: “It didn’t used to be like this.”

  “I remember now,” said Jim. “Before I went to the Farm. I could stand on our porch and see her picking honeysuckle.”

  “She can’t be…” Tom protested. “A honey bum,” he was about to add, but the words died in his throat as they stepped through the doorway into the house’s living room.

  Their first impression was olfactory: The room reeked of unwashed body, dirty laundry, and honeysuckle, fresher now. Their second was visual: Petra Cross was clad in a stained and tattered bathrobe. She sprawled across a low Sino Finn couch. A table beside her held a wooden rack that centuries’ worth of laboratory workers would instantly have recognized. Its half-dozen openings, however, were too broad for test-tubes. What they held was honeysuckle blossoms, each with its ration of euphoric nectar. On the floor beneath the table was a small pile of empty, wilted blossoms. Sticky patches much like those Tom had found in his and Muffy’s place marked the table top, the floor, the rack.

  Tom’s mother was staring at a large veedo screen that hung flat against the wall opposite the couch. On it, a singing group clothed in bright green costumes brandished equally green instruments. A line of type across the bottom of the screen identified the group as “The Lily White Boys,” though it contained only three Caucasians; its other three members were two blacks and an Oriental.

  As Tom led the way into the room, Petra turned her gaze upon him and said, as if he had been gone only a week, “Tommy. S’down and have a drink.” She turned toward her rack of blossoms, her hand hovering briefly before selecting one, and then she held it toward him in a rudimentary salute. She blinked at the others. “Friends, too.”

  They made no move toward her honeysuckle rack or the nearby window, which needed only opening to serve them all. The afternoon light, grey as it was, was more than enough to show the rich reserve that awaited on the other side of the glass.

  When their refusal had registered, Petra shrugged almost invisibly and returned her attention to the veedo screen. She fumbled in her lap for a control unit, and The Lily White Boys’ song became audible:

  You’ve got the question.

  Your perfume says it all.

  I’ve got the anther!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!

  They sang in six-part harmony, with a strong bass line, and their gyrations made Tom smile despite the pain of his losses, of Muffy and of the mother he had once known. But he ignored the singers while he crossed the room, took the control unit from his mother’s lap, and turned the veedo off.

  She squirmed in the couch, reaching toward her son’s hand to retrieve the remote. Her robe slipped to expose the grey-tinged slope of a breast, and he hesitated, almost allowing her to touch him, before recoiling from her, her dirt, her smell, her…But his reaction did not register on her awareness. Her hand patted the air as if it had indeed reached its goal.

  “Where’s Ralph?”

  “He’s at work,” she said, her voice beginning to slip into a whine. “Always at work. Works more’n ever now, and he’s promoted, got more assistants, s’posed to have more time, time for me, y’know? But no. He’s always gotta work.” She fingered the remote control unit once more, and the Lily White Boys sang:

  You’re spreading your leaves.

  I smell it on the air.

  Showers of pollen!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!

  Tom sighed, stepped to the veedo set itself, and punched the off button. The screen flickered, the picture died, and the music stopped. His mother pouted and reached for another honeysuckle blossom, while Jim and Julia shared glances. Tom noticed, and he had to agree: Obviously, his family was in a bad way. Petra was what she was. His father was fleeing into his work, or perhaps to a mistress in the city, one who was not a honey bum. Tom understood how his friends might feel sorry for him, though he hated that understanding. No one wants to be an object of pity.

  Tom himself simply stared at his mother
. She drained another blossom and muttered, “Me, I just stay home and watch the veedo. And get potted.” She tossed the empty blossom on the floor and reached for another, but the rack was empty. She held it up toward her son. “Get me some more? Please? That’s a good boy, Tommy.”

  He grimaced, but he did as she wished. He opened the window, admitting a gust of cold, damp air, plucked blossoms, and inserted one in each of the rack’s holes. When he was done, he closed the window and passed the rack back to his mother. She immediately grabbed a blossom and drained it with a sigh. “So much nicer fresh,” she said. “Oh, yes.” Then she blinked at Tom as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Tommy! What are you doing here? You’ve been away for…”

  He nodded, tears springing to his eyes. “I know,” he said. “A long time.” He hesitated, while his friends backed up toward the door into the room as if to give him what privacy they could. Jim set Freddy down and shook his arms in mute expression of their fatigue. Freddy remained uncharacteristically silent, leaving the stage, like the humans behind him, to the mother and son.

  “Did you get married?” asked Petra, peering toward Freddy. “Is that a kid? My grandson?”

  “No, Mom.” He didn’t try to explain what Freddy really was. “I got a girlfriend, though. She was kidnapped yesterday.”

  Petra’s expression shifted rapidly from sympathetic interest through consternation to a bitter skepticism. “You sure she didn’t just runaway?”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head and described the way the apartment had been when he came home. “I wanted to tell you and Ralph. Share it, you know?”

  “Just like he really was your Daddy?”

  “I guess.”

  “He’d like to know, y’know. Like to help, even.”

  “But he’s not here.”

  “Not much at all.” Her mouth turned down sadly, self-pityingly, but her face brightened immediately as she reached for another honeysuckle blossom. “He comes around, though. Sometimes. Even brings me presents.” She looked at Tom from under the ragged edge of her hair, slyly coquettish. When she realized that he was empty-handed, she added, “Brought me a Slugabed once, he did.”

  “And he’s not my Dad.”

  She shook her head. “That was next door.” She spoke slowly, as if it took effort to retrieve the memory. “Jimmy’s place.‘Fore they moved in.”

  Tom glanced at his friend. He remembered when he had first told Jim, not long after he had found out himself, that Ralph was not his real father. He had said, quite simply, “So what else is new? Mine isn’t either.”

  Tom had glared at this lack of sympathy, but Jim had said, “Test-tube stuff, you know?”

  “That’s different,” Tom had said. And he had thought it was. BRA allowed human gengineering only in order to cure genetic diseases. Anything else was “man-mucking,” and both its practitioners and its examples were hounded ruthlessly. Yet there were varieties of human biological engineering that were not genetic engineering. For many decades, plenty of parents had been using not just sperm banks, but even egg and embryo banks, to obtain the children they wanted. Sometimes the reason was infertility. More often, it was the wish for talented or intelligent or beautiful offspring. Supposedly, the donors had genes of higher quality.

  His mother continued her struggle to bring back the past: “He moved outright after…right after we…” She hesitated. She turned to stare at Tom, her eyes wide, imploring. “I wanted so much then. And he had it all. Parties. Loud music. I could see the dancing. And…So one day I climbed up the beanstalk.”

  The others were silent, though Freddy wriggled on the floor. Her eyes drawn to the motion, Petra went on. “Wanted a good time, I did. Wanted everything,‘n Ralph wasn’t giving it to me.” Quietly then, as if speaking only to herself, she added, “Still isn’t. Never did, really. The bastard.”

  She paused while her gaze roamed around the room. “Place’s a dump. Meant to clean’t up this morning.” She looked back at Tom and his friends, but her eyes seemed unfocused, her mind on other days and other people. “So I chased Jack. That was his name, y’know. Jack. A gengineer, he was.”

  She took another of the honeysuckle blossoms her son had fetched for her. “I peeped in the window.‘N there he was. Dancing. Shakin’ it. His ladies standin’ round the room, in rows, just swayin’. Giant Alices. Though there weren’t many Alices then.”

  Jim shifted his weight and spoke, loudly enough for Tom to hear. “Before I went to the Farm, we replaced the carpet. And under the old one were a bunch of round marks on the floor. Like big flower pots.”

  Petra nodded, and Tom thought that he and his true father must share a liking for the plants with the human-like faces. They were child-like, cute, pretty. But dancing in front of them, just like they were people, women?

  “That’s when he got me,” his mother said. “Just shook it.‘N when I woke up, there I was, on the ground, m’nightie all dirty. And you in my belly. He’s your Daddy. Your real Daddy.”

  Freddy snickered. “If I’d been there, you’d have waked up in a bed!” When Tom spun around, his mouth open to utter some reproof, he added, “Sorry, Boss. She may be your mother, but she’s a sillier windbag than my wife.”

  Petra was sitting stiffly upright, her eyes wide. “That’s no little kid!” she said. “That’s…”

  “Right, lady,” said Freddy. “I’m your garbage disposal. Tom liberated me when he ran away.”

  “We ran away together,” said Tom. He aimed toward his mother a gesture that said the situation all those years ago had left him no choice. “He could think and talk…”

  “Don’t forget ‘sing,’” put in Freddy.

  “And sing. He didn’t belong under the sink. So…”

  Petra blinked at the thought that a garbage disposal might not belong under the sink. After a moment, she nodded. “I guess. But…” She reached for another honeysuckle blossom, but the rack was empty. She gave her son a mute and pleading look.

  He obliged, taking the rack once more to the window and refilling it. When he handed it to her, their fingers touched and he almost failed to suppress a shudder at the gritty, sticky feel of her hand. As she took it, her sleeve rode up her arm and he noticed faint threadlike marks beneath the surface of her skin. Did she, he wondered, have some kind of worms as well as filth? Should he call the public health department? Should he find Ralph and suggest that she be taken away, hospitalized, for treatment? But she had made it clear that he saw her at least occasionally. He knew what she was like, and he would, Tom had to trust, do what was necessary. His legal father was a conscientious man, a good man, even a good father, except…

  Freddy was apparently less willing to leave Petra’s salvation entirely to others. “You shouldn’t,” he said, “be giving her that. She’s had more than enough. I wouldn’t dare even to eat her empties.”

  “I know,” said Tom. He looked at Jim and Julia as if to ask them what else he could do. “But…”

  “F’get it,” said his mother. “I’ll drink all I want. Can’t stop me. Ralph can’t stop me either. I’ll drink m’self to death. Least, it doesn’t hurt. Not like having y’son run away from home, and steal the garbage disposal while he’s at it. Not like…”

  She paused, groping at the air with the one hand that did not hold a blossom. She seemed to be searching for words, or a thought, and no one interrupted. Finally, she went on. “Jack couldn’t either. Even if he came back. Which he won’t. He’s busy. He’s got your girl, Tommy. What’s her name?”

  “Muffy.”

  “Got your Muffy. What goes around, comes around. He got me. Got her, now. Gonna turn her into a flower lady, he is. You wait and see. She’ll be potted, too. Just like me. He’s got her.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  The broken glass had been cleaned up but not repaired. The central expanse of the building’s doorway, through which visitors had been able to watch their hosts descending the stairs and residents had been able to
watch for mail deliveries and friends, had been filled in with a sheet of plywood.

  This time, Tom Cross had to use his key. He held the door while Jim and Julia entered the building. Julia was holding two sacks, one of take-out Korean food and one—from a pet store—with a rat for Randy. Jim was once more carrying Freddy. Randy, perched on Tom’s shoulder, began to shift her weight back and forth when he stepped through the door himself.

  “Third floor,” he said. Then he reached up to give the giant spider a reassuring pat. “Nervous?” he asked her softly. “I don’t think anyone’ll be there. Not this time.” Not even, he thought, Muffy. She was gone, perhaps forever. The kidnappers hadn’t called before he left the apartment that morning. They hadn’t tried to reach him at all. Unless…

  By the time he caught up to the others in front of the apartment door, he had dug from his pocket the key to the landlord’s padlock. He used it, wishing the door had been repaired, that it had a normal, working lock, that life could have returned already that much closer to normal. When they entered the apartment, the first thing he did was to check the phone.

  His heart leaped when he saw the blinking light that meant someone had called. But when he made the phone play back the message it had recorded, it was only Cal, the owner of The Spider’s Web, where Tom and Freddy once had sung, where Muffy danced, where she had been supposed to dance last night, and again tonight. “Where is she?” Cal wanted to know. “Is something wrong?”

  As he told his friends that the message was not from the kidnappers, Jim Brane set Freddy on the couch, propping his barrel form against the cushions. The pig twisted as best he could to bring his gaze to bear on everything. In a moment, he said in his distinctive nasal rumble, “What a dump! A plywood door downstairs. A chain upstairs. No elevator! No…!”

  “Shut up,” said Tom. “I have to call Cal.” He did so, explained that Muffy was missing, apologized for not calling the night before, and finally said, “Yes, the cops are on it. We have our fingers crossed.” His eyes watered.